Guest: Reforms like charters confront the law of unintended consequences |

Guest: Reforms like charters confront the law of unintended consequences |:

Guest: Reforms like charters confront the law of unintended consequences

Shouldn't we care about those hurt by "reforms"?

 Much has been written about the inability of some to be able to foresee the potential downsides of a decision. Psychology and business publications abound with examples of cognitive dissonance preventing us from truly looking at all possible implications of a decision.  What I am exploring is somewhat more specific to decisions made in education.  More specifically, it is about how a decision affects those who are NOT the target of the particular decision.

There are a couple of decisions in schools I worked in that illustrate this. At my former school, half the students were white and the other half African American.  There was consternation that there were very few students of color in the National Honor Society (NHS).  The cutoff of 3.9 (out of a maximum 4.7) covered about a quarter of the student body.  The decision was made to drop the maximum to 3.6 to allow more students of color to apply for NHS.

On the surface, the decision was quite successful in meeting its aim.   The number of students of color increased from a handful to around 30 students.  The percentage of minority students in NHS more than doubled.  So what could be wrong with this?  The problem is with viewing the problem and the solution solely from the viewpoint of the membership of NHS.  The consequence of lowering the GPA threshold not only brought in about 25 new students of color into NHS, but it Guest: Reforms like charters confront the law of unintended consequences |: