StickWithANose

UCLA professor Mike Rose offers a thoughtful piece on the current trajectory of education reform in Washington that is well worth your time, however I am afraid that he ends up missing the elephant in the room. He begins with a thorough detailing of the charter school and accountability fetishes that provides a good summary of both current trends in policy and the lack of empirical evidence to support those trends. Kudos! Where I would take Rose to task is in his explanation as to “why” these trends persist despite the evidence.

Given the immense pressure in politics for a quick result, there is a tendency in social policy toward single-shot, magic-bullet solutions, solutions that are marketable and have rhetorical panache but are simplified responses to complex problems. Charter schools will transform American education, or the linking of student test scores to teacher effectiveness will pressure teachers to change the way they teach and their expectations for what students can achieve.

This magic-bullet thinking is enabled by the paucity of schoolhouse-level knowledge of teaching and learning in the formation of educational policy. Not many policy analysts have taught school and, with few exceptions, those who have taught spent only a youthful year or two in the ranks. More troubling is something I have witnessed over the years: On-the-ground, intimate knowledge of teaching and learning is not valued, and is seen as an imprecise distraction from the consideration of broader economic and management principles that lead to systemic change. It’s like setting up a cardiology clinic without the advice of cardiologists.

Correct on every point, but there is a notable absence here: the well-oiled marketing machines and the venture philanthropists funneling money into government at all levels. The venture philanthropists see a virgin market to be exploited, and it is, to their eyes, the perfect market. It is one backstopped by the taxpayer.