Jal Mehta, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-editor of The Futures of School Reform (2012), offers a clarion call to systematic educational reform in the United States. Mehta makes three key points in his article for the American Enterprise Institute:
1. Many efforts to reform American schooling over the past few decades have done little to address substantial student achievement gaps or improve the US educational ranking internationally.
Mehta cites the trend toward small-scale reform going back 30 years to A Nation at Risk, but is skeptical about those reforms made in that time due to continued high dropout rates, sustained educational differences based on race and class, and often worsening statistics about American educational rankings compared with those of other countries.
2. Existing efforts make limited headway because they do not seek to fundamentally change the core structure of American schooling.
Mehta sums up his position on the small-scale changes of the last thirty years as “so little real reform, so little real change.” For Mehta, beyond the negative trends cited above, we should also understand the failure of previous American educational reforms because the system in which they are taking place is fundamentally flawed. Mehta observes that many small-scale model reforms have worked remarkably well, but that they did not work when scaled up in larger settings. Because Mehta sees this as a trend, he places the blame for failure not on the particular reforms themselves, but on the system in which these reforms are seeking to bring change.
3. Substantial change is possible if reformers craft a longer-term strategy to alter the school system itself, and possible pathways that could fundamentally improve American schooling include the following:
- transforming the system by enhancing teacher quality and knowledge
- replacing the current system with a set of new actors and institutions
- “unbundling” the current system and reassembling it anew
- expanding the system by linking school to society or gradually dissolving the system
- connecting students to the world of knowledge.
Mehta admits that the path to change will be paved with great resistance, especially due to the inherently conservative nature of the institution of schools. Bringing real change will provide more “control and choice” for teachers, parents, and students than has been allowed in the past. Ultimately, true change will require “significant political mobilization,” meaning key people in leadership positions, such as governors, mayors, courts, advocacy groups, foundations, professional organizations, and social movements, being willing to step out in favor of change. While “ideas are important,” “they need actors to make them happen.”
For more on this report, please visit http://www.aei.org/outlook/education/k-12/system-reform/the-futures-of-school-reform-five-pathways-to-fundamentally-reshaping-american-schooling/
