| The same thing over and over: How today’s reformers get stuck in yesterday’s ideas |
| Wednesday: Solve school problems, but don’t oversell |
| Thursday: Time to really rethink teacher pay |
| Friday: For schools, one size does not fit all |
Part one of a three-part series.
Earlier this year, historian Diane Ravitch raised a furor when she charged that advocates of test-based accountability, mayoral control, and charter schooling had overpromised when they naively said that these reforms could “fix” our education woes. Her ferocious blast was well-timed and well-aimed, and resonated mightily.
However, Ravitch also went much further, labeling such measures a sinister assault on public education. Here her useful blast at faddism got ensnared in the familiar trap of imagining that the shape of today’s public schools should define the mission of public schooling.
Thus, attempts to rethink teacher pay become “attacks” on public schooling.
Such critiques are hardly new. While skeptics of technology today fret about the “perils” of online instruction, it was once books and the printing press that were feared by educators who worried that students would learn the wrong things if left to read on their own.
It was Sir Roger L’Estrange who wondered in the 17th century “whether more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the invention of typography.”
Ravitch’s reflex leaves us wedded to arrangements that may have made sense a century ago, but that are poorly suited to today’s challenges or to making the best use of 21st-century tools and resources.
A century ago, just 10 percent of Americans finished high school. Today, reformers on the left and right want every student to graduate high school, and to do so ready for college or career.
Twenty-five years ago, the notion that a teacher in Boston could tutor a student in Baltimore was a pipe dream. Today, it’s no big deal.
If our goals and our tools have changed, then it only makes sense that structures which organize schooling should change.
When promising ideas come along, the need to overcome Ravitch-style reticence leads proponents to oversell ideas as miracle cures. Advocates demand that favored measures be adopted everywhere, as rapidly as possible and without either patience or attention to context — until sensible ideas are turned into ill-conceived fads that eventually lose favor.
The result is the tyranny of sequential orthodoxies: a succession of ill-designed or oversold schemes that take good ideas and then try to supersize them into new, disappointing orthodoxies.
Take the flurry of excitement around site-based management in the 1990s. The sensible notion that school leaders should have more freedom to select faculty and allocate resources, and that parents should be more involved in schools morphed into a regimen of dysfunctional school councils with little accountability.
The experience neither proved nor disproved the case for decentralized management; it mostly showed that half-baked reforms fail to deliver.
Or consider merit pay. President Obama sounded powerful chords on this score while running for president in 2008, signaling his belief that teachers who are effective, have critical skills, or serve in tougher environments ought to be paid accordingly.
But linking teacher pay to student outcomes is useful and appropriate only as part of a broader effort to pay employees based on their different responsibilities, expertise and abilities. New pay ought not be merely layered atop current work arrangements, but should be an opportunity to rethink the work of teaching and how to attract, retain and leverage all kinds of teaching talent.
Sensible notions are too often adopted haphazardly and ineffectually, leading to disenchantment. The lesson is not that reform doesn’t work but that discretion and judgment are the watchwords of smart reinvention.
Perhaps it is time for educational leaders and policymakers to be bolder when it comes to crafting new solutions, less insistent that these are fail-safe “best practices,” and more willing to make the case that retooling schools for the 21st century is anything but an attack on schooling.
Frederick M. Hess ([email protected]) is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas.”
