The answer Is in the room not in witch hunts

During this past school year, great teaching took place in every school, in every district in the country, says Alan Blankstein. And it wasn’t the result of top-down, punitive education “reform” measures.

“Too much of the reform discussion has been a witch-hunt,” Blankstein says. “The dialogue in the country right now is horrific. You would think our public schools have ceased to function, but good work is being done across the country.”

The challenge, as Blankstein sees it, is not a lack of ideas or great educators. It’s about “scaling” the success – reaching a much wider body of students and ensuring that the structural and cultural transformation has occurred district-wide that is necessary to sustain success. “There is no shortage of great ideas about what works in the classroom,” Blankstein says.

“We’re wasting too much time searching for bad people in education! This will not produce results. It will just leave us further and further behind other countries in student achievement.”

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The Limits of School Reform

Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

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