Where is the U.S. in School Reform in 2017?
Where is the U.S. in school reform now?
To answer this question, I will do what lawyers often do when arguing a case. I will stipulate certain statements as facts. These statements may not sound like facts but as an historian and practitioner of school reform I claim they are. Should readers quarrel with these statements, I do have supporting references and we can discuss those in dispute later. I stipulate the following:
FACT 1
Historically, school reformers have overstated defects in the existing system and made gloomy predictions of disaster. Then they have understated difficulties of changing the system by proposing rose-colored solutions.
Exhibit A is what has occurred over the past three decades in the U.S.
Market-inspired school reformers, endorsed by policy elites, media and parents, using low U.S. scores on international tests time and again, have blamed chronically low-performing public schools for hampering national economic growth, innovation, and productivity by producing graduates mismatched to the job skills employers needed to compete in a constantly changing global marketplace.
To solve this serious problem of low academic performance and inadequately prepared graduates, state and federal officials have–between the early 1980s until 2015–created and legislated a federal and state reform agenda containing the following items:
*Common (and high) K-12 academic standards,
*State and national tests to determine if all students meet those standards,
*Student test scores as the primary metric to determine success of policies,
*Accountability regulations that hold districts, schools, students, and teachers responsible for results,
*Expanded parental choice, mainly through publicly financed charter schools,
*Deploy and use new technologies to get students to learn more, faster, and better.
*Teacher and administrator evaluation and compensation on the basis of student test scores.
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