History Lessons from a Policy Insider: What Should We Be Learning from Past Reform Efforts?
Education Next(2016)
摘要
Presidents, Congress, and Public Schools: The Politics of Education Reform By Jack Jennings Harvard Education Press, 2015, $35; 264 pages. Education reformers tend to have little interest in history. They are so convinced that old system is broken and so focused on fixing it for future that they often fail to consider what lessons might be learned from past efforts. Jack Jenningsu0027s new book, Presidents, Congress, and Public Schools, is a useful antidote to ahistorical approach. Jenningsu0027s role as a staffer for U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce placed him at center of nearly a half century of federal education policymaking. Want to know about how Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) began? Jennings was present at its creation and can speak about it authoritatively. Want to know about Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Bilingual Education Act? Jennings was involved in their enactments as well. Jennings describes motivations of those who authored these federal reforms, political hurdles they faced, and ultimate success or failure of those initiatives. To his credit, Jennings does not act as a cheerleader for past reforms, including those in which he played an important role. For example, in describing results of Title I, Jennings concludes, a nutshell, billions of dollars spent on Title I had at best a modest effect on academic achievement of disadvantaged students who participated in program... On No Child Left Behind (NCLB), he writes, So it truly was a mixed bag. The spotlight was directed on groups of students whose low performance could have been concealed in past, and districts were held accountable for every school. The weakness, though, was that tests do not a good education make. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In general, Jennings is less informative in assessing effectiveness of federal reform efforts than in describing their origins and political struggles. His assessments are based more on a keen sense of what is politically sensible than on rigorous research. Of course, Jennings is not a researcher, and no one should read this book hoping to learn about latest and best research findings. The appeal of book is its firsthand history of major federal education reforms and its conventional wisdom account of their effectiveness. The booku0027s weak understanding of research is most clearly seen in his analysis of effectiveness of NCLB. Jennings examines gains on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as his primary method for determining whether NCLB has been beneficial. He counts how often NAEP gains were greater in decade before actu0027s adoption than in decade after for different grades, subjects, and subgroups. He describes NAEP as the u0027gold standardu0027 of assessment, seemingly unaware that quality of assessment does not compensate for weakness of his simple pre-post comparison research design in trying to determine effectiveness of a program. Jennings also appears unaware that there are rigorous studies on effects of NCLB and other high-stakes accountability systems, such as those by Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob (see Evaluating NCLB, research, Summer 2010) and those published by Stanford University researchers Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond in 2005, and Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb in 2002. …
更多查看译文
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络