The report touched off a
wave of school reform efforts focused on setting new expectations — or standards — for what students should learn in school.
When teacher leaders and principals collaborate, it allows principals to have access to the specialized knowledge of teacher leaders to inform leadership decisions, which can support the
implementation of school reform efforts.
Peterson is the author of Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, which chronicles the unanticipated consequences
of school reform efforts over the past 150 years and the considers the way in which the school choice movement has evolved.
And to be sure, there have been
lots of school reform efforts over the years — most well - meaning, and some even effective, like raising standards, publishing test results, creating charter schools, and offering vouchers for poor kids to attend private schools.
The state Department of Public Instruction ascribed the improvements to the efforts of the assistance teams; the assistance teams were lauded in Education Week «s annual summary of the
progress of school reform efforts in the states as well.
The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common
component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers.
In fact, a driving
force of the school reform effort is the belief, based on three decades of data, that high - quality teaching is the most - critical aspect of building the cultures of genius that that helps all kids succeed in school and life.
The Obama administration has made the inclusion of standardized test scores a
hallmark of its school reform efforts, and provided additional funding so that states could build the necessary computer systems.
I think that the thing that's really energizing to me about the work moving forward is that it really is an opportunity to continue to build on the lessons learned from prior
generations of school reform efforts.
Look again at the proposals the corporate reformers have made prominent
features of school reform efforts in every state: rapid expansion of charters, closing low performing schools, more testing, elimination of tenure and seniority for teachers, and test - based teacher evaluation.
After a hundred years of public schooling entrenched in authoritarianism, it comes as no surprise that the past twenty
years of school reform efforts have been an adult - driven process that relies on adult ideas and conceptualizations about education.