Peter Greene to Mike Petrilli: A Not So Fond Farewell to “Reform”
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham think tank in D.C., penned a piece suggesting that Ed Reform was over, that it had reached a stalemate with its enemies, but that whatever it had done was here to stay. He called it “The End of Education Policy,” a very cheering thought. Now it’s time to zero in on practice, he wrote. I was happy to see an admission that Ed Reform had run out of gas, but I had no idea how he imagined that he or any of the other reformers would have a role in improving “practice,” unless he meant doubling down on the Common Core.
Peter Greene made sense of all this, as he always does.
He begins:
From time to time Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) grabs himself a big declaration and goes to town. Last week, the declaration was “We have reached the end of education policy.”
He frames this up with references to Francis Fukuyama’s book about the end of history, and I don’t know that he really ever sticks the landing on creating parallels between Fukuyama’s idea (which he acknowledges turned out to be wrong) and his thoughts about ed policy, but it establishes an idea about the scale he’s shooting for– something more sweeping and grandiose than if he’d compared ed policy to video game arcades or no-strings-attached sex.
His thesis?
We are now at the End of Education Policy, in the same way that we were at the End of History back in 1989. Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, Continue reading: Peter Greene to Mike Petrilli: A Not So Fond Farewell to “Reform” | Diane Ravitch's blog