Allergic to the Charming Peddlers of Panaceas

Lessons Learned from Urban School Reform

As H. L. Menchan understood, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Larry Cuban's sober commentary in Education Week outlines the the "dismal history of school reform policy" and discounts those snake oil peddlers who try to reduce the complex problems of school reform to simple sounding solutions. Cuban argues that we "need to think smarter about the steady rollout of school reforms."

Let's review.

Four reform strategies have dominated national policy agendas over the past 25 years.

1. Whole-school reform began in the early 1980s, with the “effective schools” movement’s focus on transforming one school at a time by working on school climate, curriculum, instruction, and testing.
2. Since the early 1990s, vouchers, charter schools, magnets, and theme schools have breathed life into the theory that having a choice of schools motivates parents and engages students.
3. Standards-based accountability shifted into high gear in the 1990s, when U.S. presidents, governors, and mayors embraced it wholeheartedly.
4. The fourth reform strategy is to concentrate authority and accountability in elected federal, state, and local officials who can do something about bad schools.

"The good news in all of this is that some strategies have worked in some districts for a while. Many urban systems using standards-based accountability strategies, for instance, have raised the percentages of their students testing proficient in reading and math in the elementary grades."

"There is bad news, too, however. None of these district reform strategies, alone or in combination, has yet to overcome persistent challenges in raising test scores and graduation rates."

Cuban outlines the challenges school reformers face:

1. Few district reforms are implemented full.
2. Fully implemented strategies still may not alter classroom practice.
3. Failure to improve the lowest quartile of students continues.
4. Sustaining reforms still remains out of reach of most districts.

"If these are the challenges, then what must be done? In trying to think smarter about district reform, I offer the following five questions that reform-minded civic and business leaders, parents, and practitioners must ask again and again when districts advertise major changes in direction:

1. Did the reform strategy’s new structures and processes (standards-based accountability, choice, governance, and so forth) get fully implemented? Incompletely implemented reform means you never know whether what was invested ever worked, much less touched teachers and students.

2. When implemented, did they change the content and practice of teaching? Putting parental-choice structures and curriculum standards in place occurs frequently. But if these are intended to alter classroom content and practices, and yet cause hardly a ripple of change in what teachers and students do daily, then the reform has failed.

3. Did altered classroom content and teaching practice lead to desired student learning? If the answer is yes, exactly what students learned from the changes teachers instituted in content and methods must be determined and documented. If the answer is no, then dump the reform.

4. Was student learning captured by state tests? Some of what students learn in classrooms as a result of reform policies can be assessed by standardized tests, but much cannot. If the state tests miss, say, critical-thinking skills—a desired outcome—then either they should be changed or other assessments used.

5. Did students who achieved proficiency on state tests go to college, graduate, and enter jobs paying solid salaries? This question puts on trial the quarter-century- old assumption that education is linked to the economy, and demands evidence on whether the assumption is accurate. Few districts do this.

If the challenges to current reform strategies are met, and these questions answered, then the deeper (and unaddressed) issues of student access to equitable resources can come to the surface: the narrowness of current definitions of “good” schools, for example, and whether or not schools alone can make a difference in students’ lives. If that happens, we will finally be thinking smarter about school reform."