History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The cost of education wars
- 01-04-2011
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Blog by Deborah Loewenberg Ball/Huffington Post
Americans seem to be experts at starting and fighting wars over our children's education, rather than experts in building it. In the 1980s we fought the reading wars, and in the 1990s, we battled over mathematics: Do students learn to read out of their experience with language or should they be taught phonics? Do reading textbooks do the best job, or is it more effective to get children to read voluminously? In math, we argued about whether "real world problems" should drive the curriculum, and fought about whether it was useful to let students invent their own methods for calculation. And these wars had costs. American students were, overall, neither learning to read or to do math well enough. The education wars absorbed resources that could have been better deployed in the service of a system that could support the development of better instruction in reading and math, and in better results for children. Now we are slipping rapidly into a new education war, this one about how to get better teaching for our nation's students. (more…)
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