Bank Street - Educational Revolution

Bank Street - Educational Revolution

"It is no longer enough to list the mind-numbing effects of high stakes tests or reveal how teachers’ hard-won knowledge about kids, schools and curriculum has been replaced with a fanatical faith in the free market and the bottom line. Scholarly research, numerous studies, and reasoned argument have not prevailed over those who scream crisis, substitute test scores gaps for income gaps, and blame unions, teachers and non-charter public schools for the nation’s ills. Nor have we halted the transformation by exposing the profit motive behind so many of the educational reforms. And although we must persevere, it’s not enough to describe how these reforms have turned public education into a grim, wasteland littered with mediocre charter schools, a wasteland where teaching, at least in the hands of “innovators” like Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College, resembles dog training, and curriculum and learning are reduced to test prep. These strategies are not working. We need to be more ruthless in our resistance."