New TPM Column on the Next Phase of Education Reform

I've been thinking a lot about how education reform will be changing with the shifting political and pedagogical winds, so I put down a few thoughts in a column today at Talking Points Memo:

We spend tons of time building systems to build procedures and protocols around important decisions. Sometimes they're designed to prevent superintendents from using early education funds to build football stadiums. Sometimes they're aimed at incentivizing teachers to set certain priorities or instruct a particular way. The challenges of fixing schools and classrooms is generally tackled by means of systems. This is a serious challenge for the No Child Left Behind-era of American education reform, which generally seeks to collect more data on schools and use it to apply consequences to poor-performers. While the education reform movement is hardly monolithic, most reformers are enthusiastic systems-builders. There are good reasons for this — for instance, American education data are laughably incomplete — but the approach has serious limitations.