CURMUDGUCATION: Jay Greene: The Failed Premise of Reform

CURMUDGUCATION: Jay Greene: The Failed Premise of Reform

Jay Greene: The Failed Premise of Reform

You may not read a lot of what is written by folks on the reformster side of modern corporate reform these days, but you probably should. First, it's important to understand what they're thinking these days. Second, there's a heck of a lot of nuance out there, because what we think of as reformsterism is actually several different groups working for several different motivations. Third, there is some pretty pointed criticism of reformsterism that comes from inside their own tent.

One such voice is Jay Greene (not related to me, as far as I know). Greene is a professor of 21st Century Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and he supports a lot of things that I think are bunk and aims for a lot of goals that I think should not be achieved. But over the years he has often been wiling to say "That's not going to work" and then transition straight into "That did not work."

He just posted a brief column that is a kind of inventorial "I told you so" for reform, muses about what all the various failed reforms have in common, and finds not that he's so much smarter than other folks, but that they are operating from a flawed premise, mainly "that there are policy interventions that could improve outcomes for large numbers of students if only we could discover them and get policymakers and practitioners to adopt them at scale." And then he writes this paragraph:

I begin with a different theory. I suspect that there are relatively few educational practices that would produce uniformly positive results. Instead, I’m inclined to think of education as similar to parenting, in which the correct approaches are highly  CONTINUE READING:    CURMUDGUCATION: Jay Greene: The Failed Premise of Reform