Fixing Our Schools

I'm heading out to see "Waiting for Superman." The film trailer is here. I'll have more on this later, but I'm reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. She makes the interesting argument that a genuinely conservative approach to education reform is to be wary of "speculative" and "uncertain" educational fads. She's particularly worn out on the decades-long push for market-oriented reforms focusing on choice and business-driven "total quality management," which she says basically deteriorated into the raw accountability movement. I'm not near ready to jettison potential reforms focusing on school choice. Still, Ravitch also points out that what all schools need is a coherent curriculum grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, as well as expectations that schools and students should together be working harder, in terms of hours of teaching and homework, than has become the norm today.

I'll have more on these issues in an upcoming post. Here's President Obama's weekly address below. I simply don't trust this administration on education reform, so more on that later. For now check WaPo's forum, "How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders."