School Reform: Fifteen Years of "Diet Plans" That Couldn't Fail
Imagine you wanted to lose a few pounds. (Most Americans do; so that might not be hard too hard.) Now picture some svelte fitness guru who promises success: “Follow my plan and you cannot go wrong. You will lose all the pounds you could want.”
You try the plan for six months and gain seven pounds. You waste $1500 dollars on special diet supplements, too.
A second weight-loss guru comes your way. “Follow my plan and you cannot go wrong,” she insists. “You will lose all the pounds you could want.”
You do as you are told again, but put on ten pounds. Even your “fat pants” no longer fit. (Not that I would ever know!)
And you wasted another $1200 on diet shakes and exercise CDs.
Eventually, you try a third, fourth and fifth diet plan. Every time, the gurus promise you cannot go wrong.
Not a single plan works.
Well, after fifteen years of school reform that’s where we find ourselves as a nation today.
You may not recall now, but the push to “fix” U. S. education began in earnest in 2001, in large part due to test results from countries around the world, results from a test that had not existed till 2000, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test.
In the spring of 2000, 15-year-olds from 32 nations, mostly first-world countries, took the new test. U. S. students finished 15th in reading, with an average score of 504. In math we finished 18th with an A Teacher on Teaching: School Reform: Fifteen Years of "Diet Plans" That Couldn't Fail: