Patrick Welsh is an experienced teacher who writes often in the Washington Post about the real problems of schools. If only the editorial board of the Post–besotted with the failed strategies of corporate reform–would heed the wisdom of Patrick Welsh!
In this article, he describes the many reforms that have been imposed in teachers in his high school since he started teaching forty years ago. The article refers to “four decades of failed school reforms.”
Now we are in the worst of all reforms, where the “reforms” are devised by non-educators or people who taught for a year or two. Where non-educators or those with minimal experience are made state commissioner of education and use their power to demoralize teachers and destroy the teaching profession.
This era will end. But how many excellent teachers will we lose before the reform industry admits its failure and goes away?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ah, it was ever thus. Remember when “Behavioral Objectives” were going to change EVERYTHING in education? when every district and state department in the country required these despite the fact that the cognitive revolution in psychology was by then decades old?
One day teachers and principals will learn to tell these people to get the hell out of their classrooms.
For an amazing romp through the history of failed school “reforms,” see Diane Ravitch’s superb Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.
We never lack for amateurs (politician, pundits, plutocrats) with solutions.
Oops. That should be politicians, pundits, plutocrats, and profiteers
So, the lesson is . . . ? All reforms fail? If all reforms fail, then maybe it is the teachers. How were the former reforms similar to or different from those prior ones. We have to realize that the lay public is not as good ay reading between the lines as are we.
The lesson is that meaningful teaching and learning cannot be packaged and codified for mass distribution. There are no silver bullets.
I think that is probably correct and it is why I argue in favor of allowing students to find the unpackaged meaningful teaching that speaks to them, even if it lies in a school outside of the “neighborhood”.
Any reform that is sold as a panacea will fail, yes.
I read this and thought it rang true to my own experience, not as an educator but as a student (graduated high school 1976) and then as a parent (oldest graduated HS in 1996, youngest currently in 7th grade).
My own experience growing up in a small college town in Ohio was the most ideal until high school when the first of reforms started to hit (early 70s)– tracking students by ability. It was miserable by the time my oldest reached middle school and tracking had moved on to separating kids by social class (parent support at home and expectations after HS) and ability to conform to educations standards. With my youngest we have come to the point where we go along with what we can agree with from our schools, and resist that which is just plain asinine. I think the opt-out movement is one of the best ideas to come down the road yet.
Throw “DI” (differentiated instruction) into the garbage as well.
Teachers mistakenly bought into this awful concept because it appears to cater to students’ individual needs, and to address issues of equity, a particularly sensitive issue in racially segregated communities. In reality it presents a nearly impossible teaching model that inappropriately places each student at the center of the universe, while offering a tortured rationalization for heterogeneous grouping, which is appealing to administrators because heterogeneous grouping allows for bigger and more evenly distributed class sizes, thus saving money.
Kids cannot learn Algebra II in a class with students who belong in a much lower math class; they cannot effectively study Hamlet in class with students reading on a 4th grade reading level. Differentiated instruction is one of the main trends that has caused parents to dive head-first into the charter school movement as an escape.
Now, Advanced Ed which is what my school system’s accreditation is through, requires differentiated instruction. We are up for reaccreditation next school year and my principal is going insane over differentiated instruction. I always meet students where they are without loosing y strugglers and boring my high achievers and have some assignments that include choice by interest, but enough is enough. There’s not enough tie in the day to differentiate for everything much less the time to plan it all.
I agree here as well, but have found there is a great deal of hostility here to the idea of tracking students.
True “tracking” is problematic because of its inflexibility; the word implies a track that is impossible to get off. I prefer a more flexible approach, the offering of courses of varying levels of difficulty in recognition of the wide spectrum of ability levels students have, with student and parent choice as to which level of course the student takes. (As opposed to the school authoritatively forcing students into specific tracks.)
Different ability levels are disturbing to many in America because of our unfortunate correlation between race and socio-economic status. As Diane has so well documented, there is a very strong correlation between socio-ecomonics and academic achievement; and if there is also a strong correlation between race and socio-economics, then there is a consequent correlation between race and academic achievement. In a school with ability-level groupings, then, you might walk into an accelerated class and see mostly white kids, then walk into a remedial class and see a disproportionate number of black and hispanic students; and thus the school APPEARS to be wrongly tracking kids according to race. The school probably (hopefully) is doing no such thing–what is reflected in the racial composition of the levels is the socio-economic correlation, not any overt racism on the part of the school–but such seeming discrepancy makes us understandably disturbed. The differentiated instruction movement is an attempt to rectify this problem, but it just brings everyone down by giving such a wide array of ability levels that the teacher has no choice but to dumb things down for everyone.
Here is yet another study on the failed merit pay schemes that met the highest standards for experimental control.• Fryer, R. G. (2011). Teacher incentives and student achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools (NBER Working Paper No. 16850). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study showed teacher incentive pay had negative impacts on student achievement.
I don’t get it. Why cling to failed reforms? Does the US DoEd & it’s followers suffer from a tragic flaw of Greek Tragedy proportions? Why do we keep pushing these rocks up the hill?
The “reform” movement will NEVER admit its failure until they get their hands on every penny that should be spent on public education. They aim to destroy or cop-opt the Teachers’ Unions, fleece students and parents and the government for tuition money to for-profit schools, and send their own children to elite not for profit schools. Their agents and their dupes must be opposed and fought constantly. I look to people like you, Diane, to continue to lead the growing opposition
“cop-opt’ should be “co-opt.”
More federal money for charters courtesy of Arne Duncan:
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-awards-28-million-charter-school-grants-planning-program
Meanwhile, public school kids lack toilet paper.
Maybe they’ll let the public school kids tour the new federally-funded charters. See what a new school looks like. Then they can go back to the public schools reformers have abandoned.
Talking about these so-called school reform: Dr. Ravitch, I noticed looking back on the last three chapters that we have written on The MACE Manifesto that we have cited your “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” and/or “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education” in each of these chapters. I commend Mr. Welsh on The Washington Post piece. Teachers are sick to their stomachs when they hear the dreaded words, “school reform.” It’s all a bunch of bullsh-t, and to quote my sweet 88 year old mother, “It’s enough to make you want to chew tobacco.”
http://themacemanifesto.com/