The Education Reform Book Is Dead: Long Live Education Reform

For this 10th anniversary issue, Education Next asked me to highlight the education reform books, released over the last decade, that define currently dominant education-reform strategies. For any previous decade, this would be relatively easy to do. But picking a recent education-reform book that epitomizes current reform thinking is nearly impossible. The problem is not that there are too many highly influential books to choose from. Nor is it too soon to have the proper perspective. The problem is that education reform thinking is being shaped less and less by books. As we are seeing in other policy areas, blogs, articles, and other new media are displacing books as the primary means by which intellectual policy movements are formed and sustained. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If we were talking about the 1960s, I could easily offer Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age as the articulation of that era's strategy of increasing resources devoted to education, particularly for minority students. The revival of progressive education, with open classrooms, student-centered learning, and whole language, which was all the rage in the 1970s, could be found in a few influential books of that time. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom come to mind. If we were talking about the 1980s and the growth of the standards and accountability movement, we could credit E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. And the case for school choice was laid out in the 1990s by John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The first decade of the 21st century has also had a dominant strategy: incentive-based reforms, such as increasing competition among charter and district schools, merit-pay plans to improve teacher quality, and school-level accountability based on testing. But no single book or set of books stands out as the voice of these reforms. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Rather than articulating a broad, theoretical case for reforms that have been embraced by policymakers, the books of the were more likely to engage in debates over evidence, articulate a strategy that had not been adopted, or do battle against the strategies that policymakers did adopt. (See educationnext.org/ed-next-poll-top-books-of-the-decade/for the results of a web poll that invited readers to vote for their favorite education books.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My own book, Education Myths, may have bolstered efforts to enact the incentive-based reforms that dominated the decade, but it did not provide the conceptual rationale for the movement. William Howell and Paul Peterson's Education Gap was more a review of the evidence from voucher experiments than it was a call to arms for incentive-based reforms. Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth's Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and State-houses and Frederick Hess's Common Sense School Reform both make a case for incentive-based reforms, but they are also primarily reviews of the current research rather than the articulation of a new reform strategy. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some books from the aughts did make theoretical arguments for new reforms, but those reforms have not been embraced by policymakers, at least not yet. Terry Moe and John Chubb's Liberating Learning, Paul Peterson's Saving Schools, and Clayton Christensen et al.'s Disrupting Class all make the case for technology-based schools that substitute computers for human instruction. Someday that may be the dominant education-reform strategy, but that day is not today. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The most common type of education reform book from the period argued against the dominant strategies. Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education, Richard Rothstein's Class and Schools, Daniel Koretz's Measuring Up, Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap, and Deborah Meier's In Schools We Trust, among many others, are notable for their opposition to incentive-based reforms. …