"The education-reform debate as we have known it for a generation is creaking to a halt." So begins a??compelling??article by Checker in National Affairs. It's??far too in-depth of a piece to summarize adequately here, but I will try nonetheless. Checker argues that the ideas behind the current wave of education reform--standards, testing, choice and the frameworks built around them--are outliving their usefulness. They aren't misguided, but they've been insufficient to "force the rusty infrastructure of American primary and secondary education to undergo meaningful change." He writes that "[t]he next wave of education policy will therefore need to direct itself toward even more fundamental questions, challenging long-held assumptions about how education is managed, funded, designed, and overseen." In other words, it will require bold new thinking.
He then examines how we arrived at this point, tracing what happened since the 1983 A Nation At Risk report, and the rise and demise of education reform consensus. At the moment "no one way of thinking about education policy has taken hold," he writes, describing the fragmentation that currently exists. He continues: "This fragmentation suggests that simply making minor tweaks to longstanding reform concepts will not suffice--and that the time has come to question old assumptions. American education today is faced with the challenge of--and the opportunity for--a serious rethinking from the ground up."
There's much more to chew on and I'm not quite sure I'm doing it justice here. It's a piece that should definitely be read. Please do.
--Amy Fagan