Education Reform’s Blind Spots…And How to Address Them

As a former teacher, as a (deeply appreciative) former public school student, I’ve always thought of education reform as part of a broader movement in pursuit of social justice and educational equity. A few years of writing publicly about education quickly made it clear to me that many people don’t see the reform movement that way. And while some reform criticism reduces pretty quickly to cynical ad hominem attacks, I’ve come to realize that some of the more thoughtful pushback is a response to reformers’ mistakes. So in my first column for The 74 Million, I offer some advice to my fellow reformers:

People who care about some (or all) of these issues quickly hear from opponents that they’ve joined a powerful team of “corporate reformers” who supposedly hate teachers and want to find ways to get huge, secret profits from making changes to America’s public education system. They also hear that teacher accountability proponents don’t understand how child poverty affects schools, or that public charter school supporters must oppose school integration, or that pushes for higher academic standards distract from our inadequate early education investments. To be a reformer, so the argument goes, is to have tunnel vision, to see only the few issues that reformers usually talk about. Rather than engaging the merits of reform positions, critics simply move outside the issues that reformers usually discuss…[And] reformers definitely carry a share of the blame. They make it easy for critics to move the debate around. Support for the Common Core, for instance, is intellectually irrelevant to supporting expanded access to high-quality pre-K (reformers like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have supported both for years). Reformers should be able to say, “No question, more and better early education access is a good thing. So is the Common Core.” They usually don’t make this sort of argument. Why not?

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