Education Reform: Rest In Pieces

The education reform 'movement has died. The focus on better educational outcomes never will.

In a stunningly rare moment of alignment, the political Left, Right, and Center commentariat agree that education reform has died.

The once vigorous movement challenged the status quo for decades with theories and practices meant to hold school systems accountable for improving classroom instruction by using data or creating new schools for students left behind.

The unifying focus on results and outcomes made reform a muscular champion for neglected children living in the vast academic shadows of traditional education.

Ultimately, I’m told, the demand that reform focuses on equity in education - a fancy way of saying that it not being racist - was too much for the reformer brain.

Reform’s heart was always weak. Its soul, nonexistent. And, as such, the body atrophied.

A Washington Post op-ed by Perry Bacon, Jr. says the American education system can now shift from an obsession with test scores and job preparation to focusing on learning, creativity, integration, and citizenship.

That’s the leftist view. Perry Argues that Democrats and Republicans over-dialed on job preparation as a focus of education. He says real reform will focus on critical thinking and teaching economics, history, and science to enable people to be good citizens and foster an appreciation of the arts.

Meanwhile, long-time reformers Checker Finn, Jr. and Rick Hess wrote a masterpiece (The End of School Reform) in National Affairs confirming reform's terminal health, but with more emphasis on how the blacks and social justice folks were the skunk in the reform garden party. Obama ruined everything by focusing on Civil Rights guidance to schools and brutish government incentives meant to strong-arm states into adopting reform proposals.

It was “peak technocracy,” by their telling.

The notion that reform was mostly a solution to the plight of black children had short-term benefits, but also long-term costs. On the plus side, it addressed an undeniable problem — that too many black and urban students were miserably served by their schools — and avoided alienating contented suburban parents. This tack also paid large dividends for charter-school advocates and fragile new ventures like Teach For America. Over time, though, the costs of this strategy would mount. Reform's urban focus meant that it came to be seen by many suburban and rural parents as out of touch and irrelevant, if not hostile. In places like Newark and New Orleans, the movement would eventually be pilloried as a caricature of white, carpet-bagging funders and do-gooders.

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Obama's education and justice departments effectively called for race-based disciplinary quotas, threatening school districts with serious consequences if their disciplinary practices had a disparate impact on minority youngsters (never mind whether the classroom disruptions that led teachers and principals to suspend students may have had disparate origins). The presumption of racism began to take root in federal policy. That stuck in many craws — and not just those on the right.

And, from the center, journalist Matthew Yglesias’ sees reform’s death worthy enough to write a three-part series about it (The strange death of education reform). He offers a moderate, plodding walkthrough of reform’s undoing. There’s a lot of good detail about how the most important items about teaching, learning, and assessments were diminished over time. There’s too much in his accounting to summarize here, but I encourage you to read it.

Also from the center, Maria Ferguson wrote a level piece for Kappan (Is education reform dead?) that argues the “death” of reform is more about disappointment with the results of expensive, splashy proposals and inattention to impacts on the communities supposedly served by reform.

I’m sympathetic to this view more than the others. The biggest lesson in education is that it’s easier to make big promises than to scale programs or schools that get big results for all kids. Research and innovation move systems forward, but there will be setbacks, advances, and learnings. Promising proposals sometimes fall flat, and policymakers, pundits, and the public have little appetite for mixed outcomes. Drunken fools rush in with silver bullets - a school governance model, tech app, choice policy, etc. -, and sober adults have to clean up the messes reform leaves behind.

It’s messy. Complex. And worth all the trouble because nothing is more dangerous than allowing systems to fail kids and ruin their futures.

Some say reform lives on

I should tell you that a portion of the American public school believes it possible that Tupac still walks the Earth,” because, similarly, there are people who believe reform still lives.

Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli might be in that camp.

While he agrees with Finn & Hess about how the “Washington Consensus” - aka, bipartisan policymakers - killed education with the blunt instrument of government overreach, he thinks reform survived even if the bipartisanship did not.

Here’s his evidence:

And yet. Let’s take a look at the real world, shall we?

• The charter school sector continues to grow, energized by the lackluster response of traditional public schools to the pandemic.

• The Common Core standards remain in place in a majority of states, even if they go by different names.

• Annual testing is still here—with better, tougher tests than we had a decade ago.

• High-quality instructional materials aligned to the standards continue to gain market share.

• And that’s not to mention the explosion of private school choice (mostly supported by Republicans) or the progress on school funding equity (mostly supported by Democrats).

I hate having to admit he’s mostly accurate. That’s certainly no way to keep a feud alive, and I’ve done quite well on that front for a while.

He rings all my bells here. The soap opera of insider political stories told in the reform autopsies are entertaining, but education is about classrooms, instruction, curricula, schooling, standards, and instruments that measure student progress so leaders can intervene when and where needed.

His last bullet irks me because it validates policy fetishes of the left and right. I support the idea of school choice and the necessity of funding as levers for educational progress. Still, neither accountability-free vouchers that subsidize private schools nor no-strings-attached dollars to school districts with inequity on autopilot ensures better academic outcomes.

Natalie Wexler, author of “The Knowledge Gap,” is another reform true believer who backs Petrilli in saying reform isn’t dead.

She says:

Another funny thing: Despite the obituaries by Yglesias and others, education reform may be very much alive. It depends on how you define “reform.” Are politicians bemoaning low test scores and insisting that schools and teachers be held accountable for them? Nope. But are fundamental changes happening across the country that could result in millions more students being able to read, write, and learn more effectively?

If you just looked at media coverage, you might say no. But if, like me, you spend a lot of your time traveling around the country to speak about how schools can change and encountering enthusiastic audiences of educators who are ripe for it—and often in the throes of it—then you might say yes. And you might even call that reform.

Wexler ably avoids nihilism by pointing to effective reforms like knowledge-rich curriculum and evidence-based reading instruction as known contributors to student achievement and improved outcomes.

“There’s a lot more that schools can do to unlock students’ potential. Maybe education can’t turn every student into a genius, but, when done in a way that lines up with scientific evidence, it can enable all students to show us what they’re truly capable of achieving,” she says.

While I believe reform has in fact died, I want to buy what Wexler and Petrilli are selling. The best descendants of reform live on, and we’d do well to keep them in trust.

No matter what happens, the aims of reform are the priority for education

Now, for the opponents of reform, don’t wear a halter top to reform’s funeral just yet. Reform may be dead, but it will resurrect if for no other reason than the fact that justified reform in its many past lives on today.

The majority of American schoolchildren are not reaching their potential.

They aren’t reading or doing math at the levels they should be, impacting their ability to excel in other areas of schooling.

While white parents with resources shouldn’t overstate their children’s success, we have to acknowledge that historically marginalized groups - a growing share of public school students - continue to have poorer results. There are material consequences for that problem. The inequities in employment and wealth we lament for adults are largely driven by what do in schools for children.

Reform will live again if for no other reason than the outcomes for education’s current status quo are untenable for a good society.

To that end, I expect the bones of reform to reanimate in some other form.

Those bones are:

• Accountability: the idea that giving $800 billion to a system of education should produce capable graduates for society.

• Standards: setting a common bar for what children should know to be considered ready for the world.

• Interventions: the commitment to calibrating systems when they have areas that fail by studying the failure and trying new solutions.

• Instruction: focusing on the empirical fact that strong classroom instruction by well-prepared and supported teachers is tied to student success.

• Outcomes: the big daddy of all reform ideas, this one says that nothing in education is good if student outcomes are poor. The test of all our best theories or ideas is if they produce educated youth.

Hopefully, in its next iteration, reform’s bones will embody humanity for the learner, respect for the teacher, and an eye on democracy so our systems work equally well for all.

R.I.P Reform. Long live teaching and learning.