Ed Reformer Admits Ed Reform Fundamentally Mistaken

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at Edward Moscovitch's article in Commonwealth Magazine.

What else to make of his admission that the assumptions underlying educational reform were critically flawed? It's nice to see one of the decision-making elite admitting the fact that it wasn't the laziness of teachers and students that was dragging down educational progress. Of course, we could have told them that a long time ago. In fact, we tried. But they weren't listening. We could also could have told them that MCAS tests didn't really offer any carrots, just sticks (and not a few stones).

Written almost 15 years after education reform was passed in 1993, "Ed reform’s missing piece: Bridging the achievement gap will take much more than carrots and sticks" offers the final realization:

The proposals on which the education reform law were based, which I helped put together, never addressed the question of exactly how schools would make the desired gains. Our assumption was that with substantially more funding, along with the carrot and stick of the MCAS exams, educators would have the tools to achieve those gains. It’s now apparent that there was a critical piece missing: a systematic way to help principals and teachers make the necessary changes. In effect, the reform law was based on the premise that teachers and principals knew what to do but for some reason weren’t doing it; embarrassing them through low MCAS scores, while decreasing their enrollments through school choice, would somehow get them in gear. This fundamental premise was mistaken.

Follow the link to Commonwealth Magazine to learn about the missing piece to education reform that Moscovitch claims to have discovered. The article reads like an advertisement for the Bay State Reading Initiative, a private, non-profit organization that he chairs. BSRI, by the way, relies on government funding for a large part of its budget and costs schools systems $100,000+ a year. Why we should believe anyone, however, who helped set the entire Commonwealth on a multi-billion dollar path that unjustly abused students and teachers is beyond me.

--Mb