Jay Mathews is a veteran journalist for The Washington Post who has covered education for more than three decades. He has written books on Jaime Escalante, a Los Angeles high school math teacher and KIPP charter schools. This article appeared in the Post April 17, 2021.
As one of our most celebrated education reforms — the Common Core State Standards — sinks into oblivion, will we finally give up on big-time top-down plans to save our schools?
I bet we won’t. We can’t help ourselves, even with convincing proof from an intriguing new book that any further outsized attempts to raise achievement with better standards will fail, as all the others have.You can feel the exasperation in every word as Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, sums up his main conclusion in “Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core.”
“The idea of standards-based reform should be abandoned. It doesn’t work,” he wrote.
Those of us who put our faith in bottom-up reforms, with individual teachers raising standards for each child, can find some hope here. “It could be that CONTINUE READING: Why Our Many Big Plans to Raise Educational Standards Will Never Work (Jay Mathews) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice