The education reform cycle goes like this: everybody agrees the schools are performing inadequately. Someone--a politician, an administrator, an education theorist, doesn't really matter--comes up with a scheme to fix it. In the process of selling this scheme, its proponents promise the world, dismiss critics as obstructionist, drastically underestimate the difficulty of implementation, forget about other interlocking problems (or assume they will just go away), and ignore entirely the possibility of unintended consequences. The reform eventually goes through, fails to deliver what it promised, and everybody in the system gets more cynical about education reform. NCLB is the most recent reform to follow this pattern, and the most spectacular failure. The unfortunate thing is, this cycle claims good and bad reforms. NCLB was flawed from the beginning, but a lot of good ideas crash and burn for the same basic reasons.Stormbringer wrote:If you say so. I find it hard to explain attempts at reasonable education reform and enforcing bare minimum standards any other way though. Is there anything you'd care to share about this?RedImperator wrote:That's not really the situation. There aren't any parents saying, "Little Johnny doesn't need an education; he's going to sell crack." If they've lived long enough to have a kid in high school, they have enough dead friends to know what kind of future a drug dealer has.
There are smaller scale, grassroots reforms going on which are working. Charter schools are a big example: small public high schools, with selective admissions, which are tailored to a particular kind of student. Philadelphia's charter schools have been a success while the rest of the system has been falling flat on its face--there's a school for the arts, a school for math and science, a school for the gifted, et cetera. There's a developing trend in big city school districts to break up large consolidated high schools and create a number of smaller, more flexible schools which can take their students' particular needs into account; how well this will work in the face of increasingly centralized curriculum control and chronic budget shortfalls will remain to be seen.
I don't see how this supports your argument that democratic decision making at the school board level is the problem; this just sounds like incompetent central control instead of incompetent local control. Politicians polishing turds instead of undertaking actual reform is a universal problem, not one limited to Michigan. Pork is easy; reform is hard.That assumes that the state is relatively non-partisan and that the damage isn't already done. I know in my state, Michigan, the Democratic party is heavily indebted to Detroit voters and so they seek to appease them at the expense of real reform. A lot of it consists of nothing more than superficial, pork barrel "education" projects that yield no increase in the actual results. Second, even a perfectly honest politician would be dealing with a school system that's a joke and might as well be a juvie-prison rather than a place of learning.
