The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

“As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students,” writes Scott Joftus in Education Next. “As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.”

“Over more than 20 years in the field of education—including two with Teach For America—I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father.”

Joftus’s wonk side believes “student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds.” However, as a Dad, he admits to getting angry when a troubled kindergartener disrupts his daughter’s class and forces the “talented, but inexperienced” teacher to spend more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

“I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.”

Commenters on the Ed Next blog offer both praise and criticism for Joftus. “Teachers have been fighting policy wonks who have been destroying the happy learning environment for decades,” writes one. “But you don’t listen, it is only when it becomes personal that you reconsider your opinions and admit the possibility that teachers have been right all along.” “Had you guys listened twenty years ago, and respected our wisdom on safe and orderly schools, this educational civil war would not have had to happen,” observes veteran teacher and ed blogger John Thompson.

Rocketship schools CEO John Danner admits to similar cognitive dissonance when sending his kids to school. “However, I would challenge you as your kids grow to think more about how those skills jibe with rigor,” he writes. “Rigor is actually a form of compassion. A teacher who expects a lot of their students prevents them from feeling the frustration your children feel now, but much later in their school career. The real problem you are seeing is that your child’s teacher has high expectations but doesn’t understand how to differentiate.

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Here’s What’s So Bad About School Choice

"Choice" is a mantra thrown around by many in the corporate education reform movement, often to disguise true intentions of profiteering. Here's a smart article looking at just some of the problems with "choice". We've excerpted just a small piece, the whole should be read.

Problem 3: The Driver for Parents’ School Choices Is Not Always Educational Quality

There’s another fundamental problem with this approach as well. In our economic system, consumers demonstrate how much they value an item by how much they are able and willing to pay for it. A best-selling toothpaste demonstrates it’s the superior product by the very fact that more consumers decide to buy it rather than rival brands. Kaufmann believes the same dynamic should be at work for schools.

But society has a strong interest in well-educated young people prepared to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. This is the job of our schools. Hence we have far more of a stake in the choices parents would make for their students’ schools than we do in their choices of laundry soap or cat food.

Before we hand over responsibility to parents for determining what kinds of schools will educate our next generation of citizens, we ought to have confidence in the values that will inform their decisions.

This doesn’t seem to be much of a concern for Kaufmann. He writes that “parents concerned for their children’s welfare are highly motivated to choose wisely.” He implicitly assumes that the values that parents apply in selecting schools for their children are the same educational values that we embrace as a society. Accordingly, we can assume that thousands of individual parental choices will have a cumulative impact that reflects the values that we share as a community.

Further, since the end goal is academic excellence, we can also expect that the objective measures of educational achievement available to us, like standardized math and reading scores, will be of critical importance to our choosing-wisely parents.

We agree with the conclusion of the article.