Abstract: Visions of Equal Educational Opportunity Mr. Haberman lays down a simple rule for would-be reformers: before advocating for their pet reforms, they should be required to provide a brief description of what schools that satisfy them would look like. BECAUSE MOST Americans regard the schools as successful, most school reformers are terribly frustrated. The public wants to improve a system that it believes in, while most of the experts want to take the whole thing apart and start over. The people are interested in efficiency: they want more learning and greater cost control. The movers and shakers in education are concerned with some ideal state that can be attained if only the schools are reconceptualized and reconstructed. The people are protective of a system that they regard as successful; the change agents are frightened of what will happen without immediate and significant changes in a failed system. This difference between most of the people and most of the experts is the primary reason that the school reform movement of the last decade has failed so far and will continue to fail in the future. There is also a second and less obvious reason: it's the thing. School reformers rarely connect the problems they identify with the solutions they offer. Is there a connection between the dropout rate in Texas and the passage of pass/no play legislation? What is the connection between mandating year-round schools and raising the achievement of bilingual children in Colorado? How will requiring a high school diploma for a driver's license help the young adults of West Virginia to compete in a global economy? Reformers seldom if ever offer logic or data to connect the problems they begin with to the solutions with which they conclude. The endless reports that constitute the literature on school reform generally read like C-minus term papers in which things that are wrong with society are left unconnected to things that are wrong with the schools -- and both are left unconnected to proposals for reform. School reform reports follow as orthodox a formula as do westerns or soap operas. The introductory section presents shocking data: increases in teen pregnancy, child abuse, or the number of children in poverty. This is followed by information on how schools fail: dropout rates, school violence, and achievement levels below those of Portugal. Following these are sections dealing with what has been learned from model or lighthouse schools: how a particular school has been turned around by an effective school leader, by regular testing, or by parent involvement. There is typically a final section in which commission members, researchers, or experts advocate for their favorite school reform. What is generally missing from these reports and from other reform literature are clear connections between the societal problems with which they begin and the school changes they end up proposing. Either the reformers have not thought through their purposes, or they have recognized that they might lose support if their purposes are stated openly, or they have fallen in love with their favorite reforms and no longer give a hang about purposes, or they regard the connection between their proposals for school change and the problems of America as obvious -- something any fool can plainly see. In reading the opening sections, introductions, background, and problem statements of these reports, it is clear to me that the reform literature assumes that schools can best be improved by equalizing educational opportunity. But equalizing educational opportunity is never clearly defined. We must infer or guess at the proponent's vision of this equalized state. After much mucking about in the literature of reform, it seems to me that at least 10 different kinds of assumptions are routinely made about what constitutes equal educational opportunity. In almost all cases the vision is tacit, although a few reports do contain direct statements of what equal educational opportunity would look like. …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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