The myth of failed school reform, part 1

02-07-2011

Blog by Larry Cuban/ Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

In 1990, Seymour Sarason published The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. A decade later, Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:A Century of Failed School Reforms hit booksellers. Now, not a week goes by that failures of public school reform are dissected, tallied, and trotted out as exhibits for wannabe reformers. The next two posts re-frame school reform as looking at different clocks. Clocks? In some upscale hotels over the registration desk, clocks show times across the globe. Different time zones alert travelers to what time it is in the city they wish to call. There are such clocks for school reform also. Different reform clocks record the different speeds of reform talk, policy adoption, what happens in classrooms, and what students learn. Were these clocks in public view, policymakers, administrators, practitioners, and researchers would see that changes in policy talk and action have occurred but at different speeds, some far too slow for impatient reforms to notice. (more...)

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