Were public schools better way back when? Giving today’s schools an honest grade
By James Harvey and Jack McKay
Roland Chevalier, a former superintendent in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, liked to describe what he called the “piñata theory” of school reform: Keep beating the schools until good things fall out of them.
It’s discouraging. A steady stream of censure, carping, derogation, and disparagement has been aimed at public schools ever since A Nation at Risk intoned in 1983 that school failure meant, “Our nation is at risk.”
The denunciations rest on a three-legged stool of poorly documented claims. Our schools used to be much better. Our students used to learn more. And school failure has undermined American competitiveness as, in the words of A Nation at Risk, “one great American industry after another [has fallen] to world competition.” The Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s teaching in American elementary and secondary schools have a lot to answer for.
Most of that indictment is nonsense. No one denies there are problems in our schools. We’ll get to them. But to lay the effects of globalization at the schoolhouse door is a stretch.
Despite that, demoralized school leaders have often deferred to the judgments of powerful people, no matter how thin and poorly documented the critics’ arguments.
Let’s look at the record.
Schools used to be much better
Really? How can anyone with a straight face claim that the legally segregated schools in the Old South were an improvement over today’s schools? Or that it was acceptable for public schools to refuse to enroll children with disabilities? Are we prepared to abandon nearly 3.5 million young women playing high school sports and return to the day when only about 300,000 did so? Each of these inequities CONTINUE READING: Giving schools an honest grade - The Washington Post
Big Education Ape: John Thompson: Insights on the Origins of “A Nation at Risk”: A Conversation with James Harvey and John Merrow | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/11/john-thompson-insights-on-origins-of.html