Michelle ChenThe conversation about school reform in Washington is replete with big ideas — glossy proposals for “accountability,” putting the “students first,” fixing “broken” schools, all in hopes of making America “competitive” again.
Yet our schools are poorer than ever, and in many communities, the child poverty has deepened while test scores have stagnated. The experts leading the education reform debate have failed to draw a simple equation: a system with adequate resources does better than one without.
The gap in the logic has widened as state governments press school districts to conform to new standards — or else. States are gunning for a competitive grant fund known as “Race to the Top,” which the White House dangles as an incentive to restructure school systems. This hyped-up free-market reform rhetoric seeped into President Obama’s suggestion to “offer schools a deal” in his State of the Union address.
The No Child Left Behind corporate-style reform template emphasizes tests and evaluations, purging bad teachers, and shuttering failing schools.
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Amid major slashes to public funding, political leaders have cited assertions that money doesn’t affect student learning to sometimes justify cutting billions in education dollars. But a new report stifles the money-means-education debate, saying that money does matter, and the common political rhetoric has little basis in research.
