The Chicago teachers’ strike exemplifies, in stark terms, how misguided the battle over education has become. The teachers are fighting for the things industrial unions have always fought for: seniority, favorable work rules and fierce resistance to performance measures. City Hall is fighting to institute reforms no top-performing country has ever seen fit to use, and which probably won’t make much difference if they are instituted.
The answer lies elsewhere — in a different approach to teaching education and to dealing with the unions. It won’t be easy, but it is not impossible. It’s the way forward. (Source: "How to Fix Schools", NYT 9/17)
He points to Ontario and Finland as top performers the US reformers should be emulating but is not.
While it is encouraging that a guy with a platform at the NY Times (that's unexpected; Kristof's thinking seems more representative.) seems to be one of those people, there is so much momentum going in the wrong direction, I fear that it will have to be proved disastrously wrong before we change course. If it were just a matter of intelligent people of good will being persuaded as to the right approach, it would be easy. There is a rigid, neoliberal/technocratic mindframe that dominates thinking about education reform, and there is a lot of money to be made in privatization, and those are obstacles you don't just argue away.
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