Education Resources
December 18, 2019
If you can only allocate the time to read one book on education, this is the one. As the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s project on Reinventing America’s Schools, David Osborne provides a rigorous, experienced base survey of some of the best practices in education in America today. While this might sound dry and academic, it is far from it, as Osborne concentrates on the lessons learned from the miraculous turnaround of the school districts of New Orleans, Washington, DC, and Denver. From those experiences, he provides a compelling summary of the conditions necessary to reinvent America’s schools. While in our Education Research, we endeavored to remain neutral in the charter debate, it is hard to do so after reading Osborne’s book. While he is no ideologue with respect to charters or teachers’ unions, the conclusions are inescapable. The path to better schools challenges the traditional centralized system. In his words, “The new formula—school autonomy, accountability for performance, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools—is simply more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach we inherited from the 20th century. Separating steering from rowing makes all the difference. School boards and superintendents get to focus their energy on steering: on setting policy and direction and ensuring that schools deliver the results desired. Meanwhile, those doing the rowing—operating schools—have the freedom from bureaucratic constraints they need to maximize school performance.”
February 25, 2019
In Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, author Steven Brill provides readers with an outstanding history of the “Fight to Fix America’s Schools.” Beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education and its publication of “A Nation at Risk” and continuing through President Obama’s Race to the Top, Brill chronicles the various political and special interests that stand in the way of educational reform. Elsewhere on this site, we have perhaps surprised our readers by arguing that neither Republicans nor Democrats are really serious about improving educational outcomes of our poorest communities. While both sides pay the issue lip service, neither has been able to reach a level of compromise that results in improved policy and outcomes. While we decline to place complete responsibility for this on either side, there is a good argument, and Brill makes it persuasively, that the National Education Association (NEA) has been a fairly consistent obstacle to progress. The NEA, which has just under three million members, provides approximately 97% of its considerable political support to the Democratic party. Throughout his work, Brill describes in considerable detail the history of opposition of the NEA, and therefore the Democratic party, to reform efforts beginning with the recommendations of “A Nation at Risk” through the modern charter school movement.