Education Reform Has to Appeal to Everybody

Frederick Hess notes (he hopes) a shifting trend in education reform:

This overall approach [of “closing the gap”] has signaled to suburban and middle-class voters that school reform is something to be tolerated rather than embraced. That helps explain why big education-reform packages, such as the one Mitch Daniels signed this year in Indiana, are once-a-decade phenomena. Happily, there’s a more promising path forward. It begins with recognizing two principles.

First, we need to talk more broadly about school improvement. No Child Left Behind (subtitled “An act to close the achievement gap”) has predictably placed enormous pressure on teachers and principals to prioritize remedial reading and math instruction above all else. In a nation whose future will rest heavily on the shoulders of a new generation of inventors and entrepreneurs, one need not squint terribly hard to see the problems with this strategy.

And second, we must recognize that advanced learners will have different needs than students who are struggling to catch up. We ought not to favor advanced students at the expense of others, but neither should we dismiss their needs

Bringing less successful students toward their higher-achieving peers is an attractive initial call to arms, in part because it can help to motive a typically (almost definitionally) apathetic demographic and neutralize some of the demagoguing that often plagues reforms of government programs.  Nonetheless, parents of students who’ve begun with more advantages (whether in personal traits or socioeconomic standing) are justified in being concerned that a focus on low-performers will have negative consequences when it comes to their children for two reasons:

  1. Despite massive increases in expenditures at the federal level, education resources are finite, and not just because of the money involved.  The human beings involved in making decisions for a centrally managed system (which public schools have increasingly become) can only accommodate so many metrics.  After all, the maniacal focus (in Hess’s word choice) on “closing achievement gaps” begins with and reinforces an emphasis on the types of data that show success on that singular objective.
  2. The fact of central management means that a system will be slow to adjust.  The behemoth lurches toward one goal, and only when a significant number of current students have experienced an actual, measurable harm will it begin to stop lurching, with years more of adjustment in the other direction.

One strategy for a reform that answers these difficulties would be a more fully pursued practice of school choice.  Parents have more access to the metrics that are relevant to their children than do district, state, and national bureaucrats, and a broader range of education providers (including the full array of private and public school arrangements) are in the best position to determine how well they answer specific needs of self-selecting groups of families.  If, as some fear, local public schools become the last resort of difficult students or uninvolved parents, then those schools will be better able to shift their focus without short-changing students who don’t fit that profile.

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