The title of Rick Hess's newish book can be applied to most any education policy issue, no sweat broken. Here is Sam Dillon in the New York Times, writing an article titled ?U.S. Urged to Raise Teachers' Status? in which he reports on a report that recommends that the United States learn from other nations' (i.e., Finland, Singapore, South Korea) educational successes. What should Americans learn? For one, that having national academic standards is a smart idea because Finland, Singapore, and South Korea have national standards and, well, they're at the top of the educational heap. Never mind that nations at the bottom of the educational heap also have national standards?this point, which irrefutably punctures the logic of the aforesaid, has been made many, many times and disregarded or ignored many, many times. We will, one supposes, continue to hear, year after year, that existence of a Korean national curriculum compels creation of an American one. What else to learn? That ?developing better tests for use by teachers in diagnosing students' day-to-day learning needs and training more effective school leaders? are probably smart moves. What's that? Train more effective school leaders, you say; develop better tests? Marvelous insights, so unique and fresh! And then there's this lesson, the ?top recommendation?: ?Make a concerted effort to raise the status of the teaching profession.? Eureka!
Does Sam Dillon get sick of reporting the same thing, over and over? Do others who work in education policy get sick of reading the same report, the same recommendations, the same tired, expired-equine thoughts, over and over? Does the education-policy community ever grow annoyed at having these boring old ideas presented as au courant? Does it tire of arguing for decades over the same things? Does it flag beneath the weight of the clich?s, banalities, platitudes that everyday multiply. Does it care that many education-policy articles that appear in today's newspaper could have appeared, and did appear, in the same newspaper in 1987? Or does it just trudge on, reading and repeating and discussing and debating the same thing, over and over, slouching toward some educational mirage, somewhere in the distance?
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow