SEARCH
Tulane University Professor Douglas N. Harris gets the research wrong in his response to a Wall Street Journal editorial praising school choice. The Journal referenced the fourth edition of my A Win-Win Solution report, which reviews the empirical research on school choice programs. Harris mischaracterizes the research and my report. This iteration of Win-Win reviews […]
Note: This post was originally published on Education Next. The Century Foundation has published a report by Halley Potter that claims private school choice will increase ethnic segregation in schools. Although the text of the report constantly invokes words like “evidence,” “studies” and “data,” its conclusions are actually defended almost entirely by appeal to a lengthy […]
District schools, charter schools and private schools, and the teachers who educate within them, need accountability if they’re going to perform their best. The technocratic paradigm of accountability—testing-driven centralization of control—can’t deliver the educational outcomes that matter most. Because technocracy doesn’t build on the things we have in common as human beings and fellow […]
The crisis over accountability in the education reform movement is revealing that we lack a basis for building consensus on what makes a good education. Without at least some limited amount of consensus, the crisis will remain unresolved; perpetual political conflict over what we want from schools will be our fate. We can find such […]
In this series we have been looking at some uncomfortable truths about education policy. In this installment we’re going to look at how the education reform movement has avoided confronting these truths, and how that has contributed to its current impasse over accountability. It’s understandable that we aren’t eager to face these challenging issues, but […]
In our society we are free to disagree about what is good, true and beautiful, and as a result we lack consensus about what is a good education. Since education policy cannot avoid saying something about what is good, we need to develop an approach to school accountability that points toward a free community where […]
Accountability begins with the question: What do we want from schools? Education should help people grow into their potential as human beings, and education reform should fix our system so schools do that better. That means accountability needs to start with an understanding of how we help people grow into their human potential. The lack […]
For decades, the word “accountability” brought education reformers together. Today, it’s driving us apart. Our forefathers built the education reform movement on a foundation that all reformers shared: We need to hold schools accountable, so they’ll give kids the education we want them to get. Now we’re discovering cracks in the foundation. It turns out […]