Ten years ago, California’s lowest-performing schools agreed to reforms in exchange for more state funding, recalls Margaret Fortune, an educator and state university trustee, in the Sacramento Bee.
Despite big payouts to under-performing schools, the ones that continually failed to improve outcomes for schoolchildren (and there are hundreds of them) never faced any serious consequences.
. . . The state education bureaucracy charged with implementing (Gov. Gray) Davis’ school accountability plan and the education establishment lobbyists, representing school boards, teachers unions and school administrators, made a tacit agreement to discard the school reform strategies that might upset the apple cart. Instead, no matter how broken a school was, the state picked the least intrusive option available under the law. They sent in consultants. They sent consultants to broken schools because, politically, ideas like high- quality charter schools and parent empowerment provisions to allow half the parents in a failing school to petition for its overhaul would generate “more heat than light.”
Fortune hopes the new wave of school reform will produce better results. There are schools with a “relentless focus on student achievement” that are doing a good job of educating low-income, minority students. The way to get more of these schools is to “grant parents the right to choose a good school when their neighborhood school is broken,” she writes.
Gahan Wilson cartoon via This Week in Education:
About Joanne
I’ve met Margaret Fortune several times. She’s an intelligent person who genuinely wants good schools. Sadly, though, she’s kidding herself if she thinks that *any* reform as currently envisioned is going transform schools with extremely low achievement.
–Despite
Because of big payouts to under-performing schools, the ones that continually failed to improve outcomes for schoolchildren (and there are hundreds of them) never faced any serious consequences…
Fixed it for them.
What gets rewarded gets repeated. If you reward under-performing, there is no incentive to stop under-performing.
Arrgh! My strikethrough tag didn’t work!
“…she’s kidding herself if she thinks that ‘any’ reform as currently envisioned is going to transform schools with extremely low achievement.”
The prioblem is, not just “any” reform has been attempted. Only the least intrustive — which just means more of the same old failing approaches, as approved by the teacher’s unions and the education bureaucracy — have been trotted out. Which, in turn, means that nothing much ever will change, and that the parents who are aware enough, concerned enough, and probably, affluent enough, will continue to vote with their feet and their wallets, and the private school/charter school/voucher/home schooling ranks will continue to grow.
Not to strike too conciliatory note but it’s not that uncommon a human failing to hew to the safe and familiar. Ships have sails, locomotives belch smoke, you get from one place to another riding on a horse or staring at it’s rear end.
In this case education reform can only take place within the context of the school district. That effectively circumscribes the techniques that might be put into effect to those which cause the least disruption to the school district. Whether they result in better education is obviously of secondary importance and always will be.