The usual suspects, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Chamber of Commerce, are at it again. Our schools are still not good enough for these "reformers":
Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even more that requires urgent improvement. In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.
And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our education system needs to be reinvented. After decades of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
MoreIn their scheme, principals and other administrators would be given even MORE power, and right now they have almost unlimited power to do whatever they hell they want without accountability and with full support of the legal system. Teachers would be further scapegoated and be held even more accountable and the "step pay" system would be scrapped.
That's why these reformers aren't interested in true reform at all, for if they were, certainly the real problem in public education, which is with administrators, would be dealt with.
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