A few years ago, someone coined the term “zombie policies” to describe policies that fail again and again, yet never go away. One such zombie is “merit pay,” which has never succeeded yet never dies an ignominious death or loss of reputation.
I mention this because our current education system is hampered by at least 20 years of zombie policies, beginning with No Child Left Behind, then Race to the Top, then Trump’s fervent support for privatization.
In 2010, when my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing abd Choice are Undermining Education” was published, I participated in a debate with Carmel Martin, one of the key strategists of the Obama Department of Education. She defended every aspect of the Bush-Obama approach: high-stakes testing, closing low-performing schools, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and so on.
A year or so later, I was invited to the White House Executive Offices to meet Obama’s top education team: Melody Barnes, chief of the White House domestic policy CONTINUE READING: Jan Resseger: Will the Biden Administration Revive the Failed Policies of NCLB and Obama? | Diane Ravitch's blog