Apropos of this week’s announcement of another high school reform initiative:
The glancing impact of their lavish and ambitious ventures is no surprise to analysts…who, while cautiously optimistic about U.S. schools improving, insist that “educational reformers fail to give due weight to the resilience of schools as institutions.” What they term the “grammar of schooling” incorporates previous reforms that had, and continue to have, powerful political constituencies and a strong foundation in the social expectations about schooling held both by educators and by the general public.” Altering that “grammar,” particularly in millions of separate classrooms, is the single greatest challenge of education reform. As in ancient archeological sites — Jericho and Rome come to mind — where layers of different civilizations have accumulated atop one another, changing what’s under the surface is next to impossible; the likeliest effect of a contemporary reform is to add another layer on top.
From Chester Finn’s excellent memoir/history of the last forty years of education reform, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik
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