Bad Education Reform
Education reform has been in the throes of political campaigning for years now. As the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” processes took a toll on our nation’s public school structure in the past 8 years, the new Obama administration plans seem to be channeling the same efforts. Competition based reform has become the new go-to style in the past decade but critics have argued that another 3 years of the same kind of education improvement won’t get us anywhere. In fact, it could end up damaging our schools even more.
Author, Diane Ravitch, an educational historian and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, carries the full weight of this concern. Her LA Times article recently published entitled The Big Idea does well to point out the Obama administration’s lack of hindsight in their reform movement. If the programs of before haven’t fared well with our schools then why continue in a similar fashion? As Ravitch points out, “there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly, that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working”. So why does our current government continue to cling to a plan that we know doesn’t work?
It would seem that after a decade of failed ideas and hundreds of billions spent in federal funding that we should have learned our lesson by now. The Obama administration’s plan to pit public schools against charter schools in an attempt to increase the overall quality comes off much like competitive characteristics that we have been dealing with already. Schools are still competing for the chance to gain the most funding, and charter schools, although they receive advantages in the game, don’t carry much of a higher level of quality than public ones anyway. They’re student bodies are made up of already motivated students, so there goes the need for inducing motivation through competition. They are also free to remove students who don’t meet the standards of excellence. And yet, as studies have shown, “they have never outperformed public schools”.
Ravitch, like many others in her field, have begun to understand that the harsh take on reform is an undermining of the profession of teaching. Turning schools into competitive units in order to gain money has made our nations institutions lose track of the importance of well rounded curriculums and sympathetic teachers and parents. Being hardnosed toward other possible alternatives of reform won’t help anything.
These educated men and women in politics have taken a business approach to education with no understanding that our schools are lacking less in motivation and more in character. Character is what drives us to succeed, not inciting some selfish competitive scrambling for dollars. Politicians who pass the acts that will control our nation’s school fundings are taking cues from our business sectors. The Obama administration looks like it could use some character development of its own if it wants to truly improve this problem. Being progressive and creating positive change means looking back at the methods that work and don’t work and understanding your numbers. If historians such as Ravitch can easily see why these policies don’t work, then why is our Government so blind to it?
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