In an increasingly complex world, it is more important than ever to ensure that our schools are educating students for success. Education reform initiatives that focus on updating curricula, integrating technology, and fostering innovative teaching practices can give students the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
But a close look at the history of educational reform in the United States suggests that too much energy has been spent on superficial tweaks to one-size-fits-all systems and not enough on addressing the deepest issues at hand. This has made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, obscuring the social, moral, cultural, and political questions at stake.
For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, a powerful movement called “administrative progressivism” emerged to bring more administrative efficiency into education. This form of reform largely ignored teacher quality, which is the most essential component of any well-functioning school system. Moreover, it failed to address the deep inequalities that are a root cause of poor student outcomes, as measured by test scores and graduation rates.
Today, the most serious challenges facing our educational system are not ideological but structural. For example, many parents tell pollsters that they want more academic rigor in their children’s education. But Democrats, heavily influenced by the nation’s teachers unions, are mostly silent on this issue. Instead, they promote policies such as free college and universal pre-K and decry the “privatization” of education while failing to back measures that would strengthen public schools.