Proponents of so-called school reform would have us believe that the demand for their agenda - charter schools, increased emphasis on standardized testing, etc. - is widespread. The reality is quite a bit different.
This was apparent most recently and prominently last week in the form of a number of high-profile elections where education policy was central to the contests.
In Washington DC's mayoral primary, which is tantamount to a general election, voters gave Mayor Adrien Fenty - and quite likely his handpicked reformists acolyte School Chancellor Michelle Rhee - the heave-ho in favor of Council Chairman Vincent Gray. Rhee immediately dubbed the voters' verdict as "devastating" to the future of "reform."
In New York's primary contest "all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform - Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard - lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals." (h/t Schools Matter)
Even the much more talked-about victory by Tea Party-backed Christine O'Donnell over establishment candidate Mike Castle in Delaware had some connections to rejecting the school deformist agenda.
Updated...
(By invitation, following Jeff's great diary about Gerald Bracey. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The Center for American Progress is "progressive." Right? After all, CAP's website touts it as a source for "Progressive Ideas." The homepage lists its "progressive priorities." And the "About Us" blurb declares CAP's mission to draw from the great progressive "social movements of the 20th century."
So you would expect that any thoughts about education policy emanating from The Center for American Progress would be, well, progressive, wouldn't you?
CAP's most recent opportunity to push for a more progressive agenda for reforming America's public schools was released to the world earlier this month with the publication of "Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation," a follow-up report to another one bearing the same name two years ago. Even though the report was created in partnership with two well-known conservative organizations, you would expect that CAP would have inserted some fairly substantial representation of progressive education values in the report.
For instance, you would expect there to be some reference to educating children in ways that are similar to those pioneered by Francis Parker, who believed that children learn best by doing and that schools have to be child-centered. You would expect to find the influence of the great American thinker John Dewy, whose laboratory school proved that schools work best when they function as a community. And you would expect to see at least some reference to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and the work of Jerome Bruner who established that children aren't empty vessels that schools can just pour a standardized content into.
After all, the research base that proves that progressive education practices are effective has a pretty long history and is fairly well understood.
But anyone looking for a progressive influence in the "Leaders and Laggards" report will be sorely disappointed. Because there's none. Phrases such as "active learning" and "child-centered" never even occur. Nothing about schools functioning like communities, or kids being encouraged to construct their own meaning about academic content.
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