Reform Fatigue DA

“Reform fatigue” 1NC

Serious education reform unlikely – doesn’t fit with Trump’s budget or agenda and political concernsJonathan Chait Nov 16 2016 Will Trump Give Education Reform the Kiss of Death? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/will-trump-give-education-reform-the-kiss-of-death.html

The first problem is that serious education reform does not fit in with Trump’s overall domestic policy. He and his congressional allies endorse a combination of enormous tax cuts and a military buildup that would impose extremely tight constraints on

domestic policy. The Republican domestic budget would force huge cuts in education spending – which is why Trump’s previous and possibly still extant commitment to eliminate the department is the one that follows logically from his overall domestic

program. The second problem is that education reform is waging a political battle largely among minority constituencies. Both Rhee and Moskowitz have yielded dramatic and even revolutionary improvements in education outcome for underprivileged urban children, establishing as proof of concept a model that can wipe out the achievement gap between students in high-poverty neighborhoods and affluent ones. It is one of the most promising achievements in American social reform in decades. Unions have fiercely and often viciously attacked their efforts, and despite the support of Barack Obama and his administration, frequently prevailed. (Voters in Massachusetts, whose urban charters are among the most successful in the country, defeated a referendum to allow more urban students to attend charters, with heavily minority neighborhoods voting no.) Associating the cause at the national level with America’s most famous racist would set it back irrevocably.

Plans like the affirmative ARE the PROBLEM. Reform fatigue is the result and it’s the most damaging thing to educational process. This proves the intent of the affirmative will backfire.Mary Kennedy is a professor in the department of teacher education at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Mich. 2009 https://msu.edu/~mkennedy/publications/docs/Teacher%20policy/Problems%20and%20Solutions/Kennedy%2009%20Ed%20Week.pdf

Solutions Are the Problem in Education. There used to be a saying that if you were not part of the solution, you were part of the problem. The implication was that we all, collectively, were creating the problem, and that the solution required all of us to change

together. But in education, solutions are a big part of our problem. School people are swamped by a deluge of solutions.

They suffer from reform fatigue. A few years ago, I visited teachers in several districts spread across the nation. I was struck by the variety of interruptions they experienced in their classrooms, and by how many of these had begun as good intentions. Here’s one example: A science teacher took part in a National Geographic Society project that gave his students a chance to collect samples from a local waterway and contribute them to a national database. Sounds like a great idea, right? His class got to participate in a national science study. But the timing of the project caused the teacher to interrupt his ongoing science unit. When the project was finished, students had forgotten where they were in their regular curriculum. National Geographic is hardly alone in wanting to help educators. The number of associations, institutions, government agencies, and volunteers of all kind who want to solve educational

problems has grown so large that teachers are now surrounded by helpful voices and besieged by ideas too numerous to attend to. Instead of strengthening teaching, this multitude of innovations and reforms distracts both teachers and students from their central tasks, making it difficult to concentrate, to stay on task, and to sustain a coherent direction. Moreover, these improvements often contradict one another. Consider two ideas currently on the table for evaluating teaching practice. On one hand, we have lesson study, a highly structured undertaking that requires months of collective effort and careful thought. On the other, we have walk-throughs, quick and unstructured events that can be conducted by one person in under five minutes. These ideas seem to make entirely different assumptions about how we can learn about teaching, yet they

are both popular right now. There have always been zealous education reformers, of course. But the number and variety of helpful ideas is now so great that the solutions themselves have become a problem.

Reform fatigue is what is crushing the US education system, turns the case. Alternative are the only option for success, educators creating solutions is the better option. Decades of failed reforms is the proof that continuation of the present approach to reform is the worst option.Lisa Petrides is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education and a former professor at

Teachers College, Columbia University. Published Online: March 23, 2010 COMMENTARY Big Ideas and Reform Fatigue Working With Educators to Redesign Learning http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/23/27petrides.h29.html

Since Horace Mann introduced the common school in the early 19th century, the United States has been no stranger to big ideas in education. In the last century, the introduction of the GI Bill and the creation of community colleges

expanded access to higher education and helped fuel a century of economic growth and prosperity. And in recent years, too, big ideas have swept the field, from the development of standards-based reform and the expansion of charter schools to dozens of other improvement strategies that have captured the imagination of their funders, but been met largely with shrugs and mistrust from educators. Reform fatigue is so prevalent that if we could create a utopian school system tomorrow, many educators would be likely to greet it with more skepticism. They have been subjected to so much policy churn, and seen so many fads enter and exit the system without impact, they would rightly say,

“This too shall pass.” How can educators come to embrace new—and potentially transformational—ideas? One way is to invite them to help create solutions based on their own experiences. Another is to bring them into contact with other educational innovators from the United States and abroad, and with change-makers and big thinkers from creative and high-tech fields, to engage in a process of identifying, designing, prototyping, and scaling up new concepts for education processes and services.

Uniqueness: No serious education reform coming

Trump’s education agenda will reduce spending and increase control of the state and local governments.Erica Green April 26 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/politics/trump-education-policy-review.html

Mr. Trump described the order as “another critical step to restoring local control,” and one that fulfills one of his

campaign promises. “For too long, the federal government has imposed its will on state and local governments,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference to sign the order. “The result has been education that spends more and achieves far, far, far less”. The review will be conducted within 300 days and its findings will be published in a public report. It aims to ensure local leaders will have the final say “about what happens in the classroom” said Rob Goad, a senior Education

Department official. Ms. Devos is already empowered to rescind guidance and regulations, and has already done so, and any attempt at overturning laws would be subjected to a legal regulatory process. In an interview, Ms. Devos called Mr. Trump’s order a “welcomed opportunity” and a “clear mandate to take that real hard look at what we’ve been doing at the department level that we shouldn’t

be doing, and what ways we have overreached.” She said Mr. Trump has already espoused “the importance of states and localities” being able to address issues closest to them.

Trump will allow school control to remain with state and local officials. Empowering teachers matters.Miller, 17 (S.A. Miller reports from the White House on politics, policy and political campaigns for The Washington Times. 4-26-2017. "Donald Trump to pull feds out of K-12 education" Washington Times. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/26/donald-trump-pull-feds-out-k-12-education/)

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to start pulling the federal government out of K-12 education, following through on a campaign promise to return school control to state and local officials.

The order, dubbed the “Education Federalism Executive Order,” will launch a 300-day review of Obama-era regulations and guidance for school districts and directs Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to modify or repeal measures she deems an overreach by the federal government.

“For too long the government has imposed its will on state and local governments. The result has been education that spends more and achieves far, far, far less,” Mr. Trump said. “My administration has been working to reverse this federal power grab and give power back to families, cities [and] states — give power back to localities.”

He said that previous administrations had increasingly forced schools to comply with “whims and dictates” from Washington, but his administration would break the trend.

“We know local communities know it best and do it best,” said Mr. Trump, who was joined by several Republican governors

for the signing. “The time has come to empower teachers and parents to make the decisions that help their students achieve success.”

Trump administration is cutting the budget for education and respecting the decisions of the state and local level.Nat Frothingham Trump Budget Proposals Would Cut Some Education Programs Posted by thebridge on June 2, 2017 in 2017 Issues, June 1 – June 14, 2017, News, News & Features (Print Version. Elongated version to be uploaded soon.) http://www.montpelierbridge.com/2017/06/trump-budget-proposals-would-cut-some-education-programs/

At the heart of the just-released U.S. budget is a Trump administration commitment to control, often to cut, federal spending. These words from the U.S. budget, express that determination. “To help correct this and reach our budget goal in 10 years, the budget includes

$3.6 trillion in spending reductions over 10 years, the most ever proposed by any President in a budget.” Spending reductions are to come from cuts to existing programs and an administration promise to get rid of unnecessary federal regulations. Some of the cuts will come from repealing and replacing Obamacare, reforming Medicaid and welfare and “rolling back” federal regulations. The proposed U.S. Budget takes aim at the overspending of what used to be called the “Food Stamp” program, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutritious Assistance Program. These words from Trump’s budget message explain how the nutrition program can be cut. “The budget proposes a series of reforms that closes

eligibility loopholes, targets benefits to the neediest households, and requires able-bodied adults to work.” The president had this to say about “education reform” in his proposed U.S. budget message. “We need to return decisions regarding education back to the state and local levels, while advancing opportunities for parents and students to choose, from all available options, the school that best fits their needs to learn and succeed.”

Trump reducing educational regulations and returning control to the statesCasey Quinlan Policy reporter at ThinkProgress. Nov 17, 2016 https://thinkprogress.org/drastic-education-cuts-could-be-coming-under-trump-650c1ed6e807

Here’s what we do know: As president, Trump will likely pare back a number of different regulatory and oversight mechanisms employed by the Department of Education. A Trump administration would probably take a backseat to investigating civil rights issues and monitoring states’ implementation of major federal education legislation. While President Trump isn’t likely to fulfill a longstanding conservative dream and abolish the Department of Education outright, his policies will likely turn it into a significantly weaker agency.

Trump administration will reduce the federal role in education and return control to local schools and classrooms.Casey Quinlan Policy reporter at ThinkProgress. Nov 17, 2016 https://thinkprogress.org/drastic-education-cuts-could-be-coming-under-trump-650c1ed6e807

Under a Trump administration, it’s likely that in addition to the reduction of a federal role in education through ESSA,

oversight of its implementation would be dialed back significantly. A spokeswoman for Alexander told The Washington Post that

“The Trump Administration has a prime opportunity to significantly reduce the intrusion of the Education Department into our local schools and classrooms … When the Trump Administration enforces the Every

Student Succeeds Act as written, the size of the Education Department will be necessarily and appropriately diminished.”

Link – Plan causes reform fatiguePlan creates reform fatigue. Reform is not always good. Must match school context and be development collaboratively and with buy in from education professionals.Robert Kunzman (Indiana University) Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform, Other Education: The Journal of Educational

Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 1(2012), Issue 1 · pp. 121-129.

One such group, the Fordham Foundation, sponsors an annual “Reform Idol” contest. Modeled after the popular television show American Idol, the event features a question-and-answer session with top education officials from several U.S. states, in search of the “Reformiest State.” The implication here, of course, is that the more reform you have, the better. The more you shake up the status quo and end “business-as-usual,”

the better. Reform itself becomes the idol, and operates as a self-justifying rationale: disrupting the system, forcing teachers and administrators to change the way they work, qualifies as a good unto itself. But reform is not an unalloyed good, and change can makes things worse just as easily as it makes things better. Policymakers and reform advocates who manufacture endless streams of programs, recommendations, and regulations – with the apparent strategy that if we try ten new ideas, one might work – lack sufficient appreciation for the literal costs of time and the psychic costs of reform fatigue. A favorite refrain of many teachers, when confronted by the latest and greatest reform initiative, is “This too shall pass.” Contrary to

the suspicions of reformers, this perspective typically doesn’t stem from laziness or an unwillingness to try new approaches. Rather, it is a recognition by veteran educators that many of the most complex, persistent dilemmas of schooling are not going to be solved by the next program or technique; instead, the best schools cultivate a consistent, long-term vision for improvement based on relationships, consistency, and persistence. Meaningful reform requires time, measured not in the quarterly or even annual reports of the business world; even more crucially, reform must match the school context, developed collaboratively with those who will implement it.

Frequent federal reforms of education cause “reform fatigue”. This is the biggest impediment to meaningful educational change and turns the case.Matt Collette MARCH 5 2015 8:45 AM A Painful Decade of School Reform http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2015/03/05/reform_fatigue_how_constant_change_demoralizes_teachers.html

Reforms come and go so quickly at Intermediate School 61 in Queens. First there was the push for smaller schools that began in 2003. Then a mind-boggling data system was introduced in 2007. The implementation of Common Core began in 2012, a process on track to continue through at least 2022. A new teacher evaluation system debuted in 2013. The experience over the last decade at this very large middle school—which enrolls nearly 2,400 students, employs

close to 200 teachers, and takes up nearly an entire city block—offers a case study in how fatigue with top-down reforms can

become the biggest impediment to meaningful educational change. With each reform, teachers and administrators have lost a little more trust in the city, state, and federal officials setting the agenda—not to mention a lot of their time. The decade of ceaseless change started with one of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s signature initiatives: the push for smaller schools. Bloomberg (as well as the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation) was a big proponent of small schools, aggressively shutting down or breaking apart a total of 157 large, comprehensive schools. This shift, which occurred simultaneously in several districts across the United States, dramatically altered the New York City school system and helped give the charter movement a more significant foothold.

Reforms can function as an operational straitjacket – decreasing the quality of education and turning the case.Robert Kunzman (Indiana University) Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform, Other Education: The Journal of Educational

Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 1(2012), Issue 1 · pp. 121-129.

Reform can become not only a conceptual straightjacket, but an operational one as well. Consider the current fixation with numbers among school reformers: test scores, value-added measures, and data-driven instruction. Who wouldn’t want to make evaluations of quality and instructional decisions based on data and evidence? But there’s a profound difference between decisions

informed by numbers and decisions made by numbers. Many vital facets of school and educational quality are extraordinarily difficult – if not impossible – to quantify. A recent initiative of the Gates Foundation aimed at measuring student engagement comes to mind here (Simon, 2012). Researchers have been awarded $1.6 million in grants to explore student engagement via Galvanic Skin Response bracelets (which measure electrodermal activity) worn by students. Drawing a helpful link between the numbers

produced by these bracelets and ideal instruction seems a tall order, to say the least. As one skeptical teacher mused, it seems relevant – and quite a delicate process to determine – whether students are stimulated by the lesson or an attractive classmate.

Turns Case: Reform fatigue hurts teacher instructionNew reforms take up all the time of teachers to implement an administrators to enforce compliance with – this trades off with a focus on instruction and learning, which are the real core of the educational process. Matt Collette MARCH 5 2015 8:45 AM A Painful Decade of School Reform http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2015/03/05/reform_fatigue_how_constant_change_demoralizes_teachers.html

“The whole focus of the prior administration was to make everything small,” said principal Joseph Lisa, who has run I.S. 61 since 2007 and was assistant principal before that. When Bloomberg came to power, I.S. 61, located in the largely poor and immigrant Queens neighborhood of Corona, was indeed a school in need of a turnaround: Test scores were low, and discipline problems were rampant. (One longtime assistant principal, William Voges, described the school he arrived at as “a hellhole of destruction.”) So the school adopted a twist on Bloomberg’s small-schools model, breaking the school down into five distinct academies. The move offered an opportunity to improve the school’s culture and, hopefully, pre-empt any potential reorganization by the city. Each academy was named after a prestigious school—Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, and Stanford—and staffed by its own assistant principal, dean, and faculty. The idea was that teachers would likely never be able to know more than 2,000 students, but they stood a chance at getting to know a couple hundred. But the small-schools movement quickly became a prime example of the kind of fleeting change that comes and goes before even a class of kindergarteners makes it to middle school. Though small schools ultimately fell out of favor in cities across the country, the staff at I.S. 61 stayed committed to their reorganization. But they began to question the staying power of any change introduced from on high. Some of these changes are much-needed and well-intended. But, almost always, they alter a teacher’s job, requiring additional work outside the classroom to fulfill new requirements or learn to teach in a different

way. That consumes a lot of staff time—time that can come to be seen as wasted if the reform fades away. “Nothing has stuck, so people are thinking, Oh, here we go again,” said Antonella Caccioppoli, a science and social studies teacher who started

teaching 12 years ago, just as the Bloomberg era was beginning. Lisa understands his staff’s frustration because he feels it himself. Though he prides himself on working closely with his faculty—his office is just an L-shaped desk at the end of a conference room with a copy machine and spare computer, a workspace frequented by teachers with free periods and administrators who need a place to meet

—he’s increasingly unable to devote the time. He spends 80 percent of his days just making sure the school is in compliance with city education mandates. “They’re so worked up about compliance issues and deadlines instead of me being the instructional leader for the school,” he said.

Reform fatigue risks quality teaching which is more related to success in student learningE.D. HIRSCH JR. SEP 21, 2016 Don't Blame the Teachers Years of misguided curricular theories are at the core of America’s educational shortcomings. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/dont-blame-the-teachers/500552/

Why has the topic of teacher quality suddenly reached such a crescendo? Education reform has been on the national agenda since 1983, the

year of A Nation at Risk, but only in the last few years has the teacher-quality issue risen to the top. I think it may be reform fatigue, possibly desperation. The teacher is becoming a convenient scapegoat for America’s education reformers, who, after decades of ideas that have not panned out, cling to the belief that the flaw is not in the reform ideas themselves but in their implementation. Teachers are being blamed for failures not their own. The “back-to-basics” and “whole-school reform” strategies disappointed. Similarly, as the National Assessment of Educational Progress has consistently shown, the state-standards movement and the No Child Left Behind law have left high-school students just about as far behind as they were before the reforms were instituted. Charter schools, despite their laudable triumphs, are highly uneven in

quality, and their overall results are not much better than those of regular schools. Teachers have understandably become demoralized by being constantly blamed for failures not of their own making. Here is the new conventional wisdom about teachers taken from a 2013 article in the nonpartisan policy magazine Governingof June 13, 2013: The research is clear: Teacher

quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable (issues such as income and parental education levels are external). And the impact of student achievement on economic competitiveness is equally clear. That’s why it’s so disturbing that in 2010, the SAT scores of students intending to pursue undergraduate education degrees ranked 25th out of 29 majorsgenerally associated with four-year degree programs. The test scores of students seeking to enter graduate education programs are similarly low, and, on average, undergraduate education majors score even lower than the graduate education applicant pool as a whole. Education schools long have accepted under-qualified students, then offered them programs heavy on pedagogy and child development and light on subject-matter content. This scientific-sounding comment is incorrect from the start. The assertion that “Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based

variable” isn’t corroborated. According to research summaries by Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a better curriculum can range from being slightly to dramatically more effective than a better teacher. That’s not surprising when you consider that the curriculum is what teachers teach and what students are supposed to learn. Evaluating teachers based on how much they contribute to student progress in reading, for example, doesn’t make sense under current conditions in American schools. The curriculum-blind standardized tests focus on the measurement of nonexistent general skills like the ability to find the main idea, making it impossible to accurately determine a teacher’s impact on student achievement. As I show in detail in Why Knowledge Matters, current modes of testing cannot identify which student achievements and progress are the result of school instruction. The attempt to statistically calculate the “value added” by the teacher is

inherently invalid. The most likely cause of disappointing results from the various reforms is not poor teaching but poorly conceived reforms. They have been primarily structural in character. They have not systematically grappled with the grade-by-grade specifics and coherence of the elementary-school curriculum. Educational success is ultimately defined by what students learn. If the grade-by-grade content of schooling remains undefined, schooling will remain unproductive over the long run, no matter who is teaching.

Reform fatigue is a primary risk to teacher success – causes lack of morale and overall cynicism, which is the most important thing to student success and educational performance.Daniel Hurst, Guardian Australia political correspondent Tuesday 1 April 2014 02.08 EDT https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/01/hasty-curriculum-changes-will-demoralise-teachers-review-told

Teachers suffering “reform fatigue” will be disheartened and demoralised by hasty changes to the national school curriculum, educators have told a review ordered by the Abbott government. In January the education minister, Christopher Pyne, commissioned two critics of the national curriculum to conduct the Coalition’s promised review, partly to address claims that it downplayed the benefits of western civilisation and the importance of Anzac Day. The conservative education commentator Kevin Donnelly and the public policy academic Ken Wiltshire were due to provide the government an interim report on Monday, but it is not expected to be released before the midyear completion deadline. In a submission, the University of Queensland’s school of education argued the review was “compromised by its short time frame, limited representation of educational and discipline expertise amongst the review committee, and lack

of available data on the effectiveness of its implementation”. The school said there was clear international evidence that reforms leading to improved educational performance depended on focus, persistence and capacity-building. Teachers were already experiencing “reform fatigue” as a result of the constant pace of curriculum change. “Teachers become disheartened, and then cynical, when there are unclear messages about why a new curriculum is beneficial for students’ learning,” the head of the school of education, Merrilyn Goos, wrote in a submission backed by eight colleagues. “Applying these ideas to national curriculum reform such as we are currently experiencing in Australia highlights the need for time and support to be provided to everyone involved in the implementation – especially teachers. A hasty review before there is time for thorough trialling of curriculum documents is demoralising for those who are responsible for development and implementation.” Jane Hunter, a specialist in curriculum and pedagogy at the University of Western Sydney’s school of education, warned the government against tinkering with the curriculum, saying it would “come at the expense of the ever-diminishing bucket of teacher morale”. “I write to you from the perspective of being a teacher, an academic and researcher in teacher education for the past 25 years,” Hunter said in a submission. “The review is not necessary at this time. I say not necessary because many schools, teachers, parents and principals have already commenced development and

implementation of the Australian curriculum. “The work already completed has required hours of time both in and out of school. When politics gets in the way of the work of schools it is often not helpful. This is again, under minister Pyne, one such case.” Hunter said the announcement of the review destabilised education and sent a message to schools that what they did could not be trusted. The Australian Literacy Educators’ Association told the review that the constant call for a “back to basics” curriculum or a return to past

models was “not a constructive way to nurture a profession striving to prepare students for the demands of the 21st century”. It said any changes needed to be seen as an improvement of what was already in place “rather than another

overhaul, as teachers will lose energy, confidence and trust”. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English wrote: “Too much change in too short a period in fact militates against real improvement in teaching practice and potential student learning achievement because is an unproductive distraction from the important business of quality teaching.”

Change key: Collaboration with educators/students best

Decades of failed educational reforms at the federal level. Only way to avoid “reform fatigue” is to change the process – slow decentralized reforms are the only option. Mike McShane, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute in Missouri. May 4, 2016 'Reform Fatigue' and the Virtue of Going Small http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2016/05/reform_fatigue_and_the_virtue_of_going_small.html?r=1000265370

"Reform fatigue"—if there are two words that strike fear into the heart of education advocates across the country, it's those. In my conversations on the ground, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some iteration of, "Sure, our schools are not doing as well as they could, but I'm burned out from supporting the last three things folks have wanted to do that didn't work out."

The past two decades have been an intense time of education reform. From the NCLB-driven school accountability movement to the Obama-era Common Core and teacher evaluation pushes, policymakers across the country have advocated for and enacted sweeping changes to what schools teach, how they teach it, and how the state will judge if they are doing it well.

Many of these reforms have not done so hot. The Common Core...well, I don't know if we need to spill much more ink on that. As I have written for years now, I think it is a classic problem of reach exceeding grasp and a rush to involve way too many states in an effort that might have been successful if allowed to grow organically, state-by-state, over the course of a decade or more. Aside from the

widespread resistance to Common Core and many other reform efforts, numerous programs have simply failed to have the impact proponents had hoped for. For example, new teacher evaluation systems do not appear to have been meaningful improvements over the Widget Effect-era systems that preceded them.

On the flipside, the reform that has slowly but surely chugged along is school choice. Every year, more and more students enroll in charter schools. Every year, more and more states pass private school choice programs. There are setbacks, of course, but they don't stall the march forward.

Indiana is a great case study in this. In 2011, a raft of education reforms were passed through the legislature and were signed into law by Governor Mitch Daniels. These included, but were not limited to, reforms to how teachers were evaluated and the creation of a school voucher program. Where do they stand today? In the 2013-14 school year, the supposedly strengthened system still rated over 99.5% of teachers as effective. What's more, including test results in teacher evaluations while pulling out of the Common Core has been a mess, with the state scrapping its ISTEP test entirely and starting over from scratch for the 2017-18 school year.

While other reforms are stuck in the mire, Indiana's school voucher program is moving forward. After being enacted in 2011, the program had 3,911 students enroll in the program. In 2013, the number nearly tripled to 9,139. It more than doubled in 2014 to 19,809. It added another 10,000 students in 2015 to come to 29,148 and has continued to grow to 32,686 students today. In fact, the major issue that the program is running into now is that it is running out of schools for kids to go to! Oh, were that a problem with other education reforms.

Now, I understand the common objection—there are over 1 million children enrolled in Indiana public schools, so this is a tiny fraction of those students. That's a fair complaint, but I'd offer three responses. First, given polling data, it is not clear to me that every family in Indiana wants to send their child to a private school. If ultimately only 41 percent of parents want a private school option, 32,000 students is closing in on 10% of the demand in five years. Second, I can imagine that there is a varying degree of urgency among families. Some, who are currently stuck in the worst schools, need to get out now. Others might want to make the switch eventually but are OK for the time being with their schools. A slower, organic rate of growth doesn't bother those parents so much. Third, there does need to be some time for the supply side of school choice to catch up. Schools don't just crop up overnight, and with some help, more new great schools can open to serve kids.

School choice skeptics worry about choice creating winners and losers. Some might go to good schools, they object, but others will go to terrible schools. Sure, some small number of children might lose. But in a comprehensive reform push, it's possible that everyone will. If a voucher school opens and is terrible, the number of children harmed by it is small. Minor course corrections can be made in the journey. If an entire state undertakes an initiative (like changing the way teachers are evaluated or what tests will be used to hold schools accountable), every child has the risk of being harmed as there is nowhere to run. Minor course corrections are next to impossible. Everything is a big deal. And not to pile on, but the constant churn (as Rick termed it in Spinning Wheels almost 15 years ago) erodes the trust of parents and policymakers. Indiana lawmakers went so far as to scuttle their whole testing regime, they were so frustrated. It's hard to get more burned out than that.

Advocating for a slow and steady growth of schools of choice is not nearly as satisfying as advocating for huge sweeping changes that might

turn the whole school system around. But, slow, decentralized, and steady is the vision that I think has the best chance, over the long term, of creating schools and systems that meet student needs at scale. Many of the broad, sweeping endeavors haven't lived up to the hype, and children have paid the price. The slower, decentralized approach has the added benefit in the short term of protecting students from the educational fad du jour, which might mean more than many of us appreciate.

Federal reform fails – must include the perspectives of teachers and students who experience the system on a daily basis through collaboration to solve anything.Lisa Petrides is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education and a former professor at

Teachers College, Columbia University. Published Online: March 23, 2010 COMMENTARY Big Ideas and Reform Fatigue Working With Educators to Redesign Learning http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/23/27petrides.h29.html

These changes cannot wait for big thinkers to handy b down ideas from above, however. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive,

suggested at the Fest that change had to occur not by following rules, but by urging participants to buck the trends, flout the rules, and “ask for permission later.” His message: These changes will be the byproduct of efforts by educators and policymakers to work together to break through current constraints, including the traditional use of school time, limits on technology use in

schools, testing regimens and accountability requirements, isolation of teachers, and other factors. Many years’ worth of data collected from educator surveys indicates that teachers have long been clamoring to take on new roles and work collaboratively. New federal resources for innovation provide an opportunity to bring educators to the table to think through new ways of doing business that will help us break through the cycle of endless tinkering and indifference. This is an opportunity that should not be wasted. As states, districts, and

communities consider strategies for innovation and collaboration, we need to make sure that we are bringing the right people to address the right problems. It will require doing more than rounding up the usual suspects to develop yet more proposals; it will mean bringing together a broad range of talent, including those in the classroom who can help bring the wisdom of practice into policy development and system redesign. Contrary to the views of some policymakers, efforts to reconsider directions and approaches for schooling must include those who understand the needs of students and experience daily the problems in the current system. Linking together the skills and knowledge of innovators and educators from around the world to tackle some of these challenges may prove to be the biggest idea of all.

Top down, federal efforts to reform education fail. We need a new paradigm. A de-bureaucratization is necessary – the views of students and educators matter way more.Andrew Wilk on April 20, 2016 in Blog • 1 Comment How do we get past the fatigue, frustration, and fear of our national ed reforms? http://headinthesandblog.org/2016/04/how-do-we-get-past-the-fatigue-frustration-and-fear-of-our-national-reforms/

We need a new paradigm if we are to transform our public schools. The 19th century factory model of

education has certainly run its course, and continuing to scaffold new programs and promises onto a “seat time centered” public school structure is a losing proposition because it fundamentally fails to meet student educational needs.

The key to real improvement is, I believe, to “de-bureaucratize” our public schools by giving ownership and responsibility for success back to our students. Although it has been tried in dribs and drabs in our public and charter schools over the past few years, it might be time to revolutionize all of our classrooms by putting competency-based education (CBE) at the forefront of our national reform agenda.

The problem with the many top-down federal and state efforts to reform public education by way of laws, regulations, and mandated goals over the past couple of decades is fairly obvious: They all have

relied on a hammer to get the job done. The threat of withdrawing plaudits or cash—or of awarding them if some improvement can be identified—means that the day the hammer is withdrawn is the day everyone can go back to business as usual.

This pretty much boils down to handing out more and more diplomas to high school graduates who are more and more unprepared for college and career because seat time instruction is—for reasons that surpass all understanding—still considered a reasonable measure of actual

learning. A heavily bureaucratized and regimented educational establishment provides lots of comfortable rules and steady paychecks (like the U.S. Postal Service), but it is a dismal failure for our children.

Indeed, a frightening—but wholly unsurprising—report just issued by The Education Trust points out that a scant 8 percent of high school graduates are completing college and career ready courses of study before graduating. All those hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent hammering home reform have seemingly added up to zilch in far too many districts.

So here we are now, with a federal law called Every Student Succeeds Act that allows for some accountability but leaves it to states to create

their own hammers and then hit themselves with them when they don’t like what they see. In recent years school reform has become secondary to the need to make failure politically palatable. We forget that the original purpose of all this effort was to help our students to learn.

The no-nonsense NCLB notion of closing schools that fail to educate their students has largely died due to bare-knuckled political pushback from both local communities and unions. We now instead actively avoid labeling schools as failing or deficient because schools hate being labeled as failing or deficient (imagine that).

Encouraged by the very educators who might be embarrassed by the results, more states are questioning the value of standardized tests, more parents (mostly white and suburban) are pulling their students out of these tests, and more pundits and politicians are presenting the basic concept of gathering academic outcome data through testing as some sort of sinister plot to undermine the republic.

All these years of the hammer have apparently not done much other than anger a lot of people who might have been allies, blown through truckloads of cash, and left everyone a bit dazed by the human cost of all this reform—fatigue, frustration, and fear.

So perhaps it is time to put the hammer back in our toolbox and consider a different way of approaching school reform because not every problem is a nail.

Federal reforms fail Reforms too often overrule the desires of professional educators, which increases the chances they will fail.Geoff Nixon How The Education Reform Movement Affects Your Child May 26, 2015 https://www.gemmlearning.com/blog/education_trends/how-education-reform-impacts-your-child

Education Wasn’t Always a Political Issue and Wasn’t Always Reforming As the knowledge economy has made life more complex and career requirements more demanding at every level, a good education has become a more pressing basic necessity for every citizen. This has meant that education has become more of a mainstream political priority over the past 20 to 30 years. Concerns about the lack of progress in educational outcomes and concerns about equity of outcomes — the gap between rich and poor student performance — have become

emotional flash points on both sides of the political aisle, putting politicians under pressure to act! And since the 1990s they have. There has been increasing willingness to overrule professional educators who previously controlled the levers of power in education, to “reform” education and to legislate what goes on in the classroom. Education

reform has been happening at district, state and the federal level. This growing boldness to reform is occurring in a period of market-based reform elsewhere, and so not surprisingly the main thrust of reforms has been around privatization, business-like accountability and incentives. How The Sides Line Up According to the reformers, the villains are the teachers unions who resist accountability and bloated public education bureaucracies that are slow moving and over-staffed. On the other side we have teachers. For them, the villains are big business — e.g., Pearson the testing conglomerate, Bill Gates and others who are leading the charge on bringing business accountability to education — and ideological politicians who teachers feel do not understand education.

Large, utopian reforms like the plan backfire. Any actual reform that has worked has been gradual and incremental.Robert Kunzman (Indiana University) Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform, Other Education: The Journal of Educational

Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 1(2012), Issue 1 · pp. 121-129.

It seems, however, that an unreflective pursuit of educational upheaval is too often the norm in the world of educational policymaking. Many reformers, including the current U.S. Secretary of Education, call for drastic and dramatic changes to our schools. Tinkering around the edges, they assert, is for the timid and unimaginative. But Tyack & Cuban’s (1995) historical analysis – entitled Tinkering Toward Utopia, by the way – offers a different perspective, one we would be wise to consider:

Although policy talk about reform has had a utopian ring, actual reforms have typically been gradual and incremental – tinkering with the system. It may be fashionable to decry such change as piecemeal and inadequate, but over long periods of time such revisions of practice, adapted to local contexts, can substantially improve schools. Rather than seeing the hybridizing of reform ideas as a fault, we suggest it can be a virtue. Tinkering is one way of preserving what is valuable and reworking what is not. (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 5) The irony is that the most vocal school reformers today, the ones who rail so passionately against the status quo, are ultimately seeking to replace it with another singularly prescriptive vision of schooling, one driven by a testing regimen that narrows the learning experience even further. Just when boundaries of schooling are blurring and conventional notions of time, place, content, and

pedagogy are being questioned and transcended, policymakers are grasping at unsophisticated and ultimately counterproductive formulas, beguiled by the promise of “raising standards” by demanding more accountability. But this vision of accountability is one that, in the end, bases its terms of success on yet more simplistic “countables” – credits, hours in school, test scores, graduation rates. Instead, what our schools and societies require is a steady commitment to navigate the necessary tension between educational forms and options that honor the individual while also preserving an appreciation for and dedication to

the common good. Re-forming our schools into institutions that support this vision means understanding time, place, and subject matter as variables in service of an education where critical thinking and authentic learning are the ultimate goals. That may not work well as a catchy reform slogan, but perhaps that’s a virtue.

Federal structural reforms will fail – must grapple with grade by grade specifics. Federal reform = teacher demoralization and unfavorable learning conditionsE. D. Hirsch, Jr. AMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2016–2017 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1124061.pdf

But the most likely cause of disappointing results from the various reforms is that they have been primarily structural in character. They have not systematically grappled with the gradeby-grade specifics and coherence of the elementary school curriculum. Educational success is defined by what students learn—the received curriculum. Not to focus on the particulars of the very thing itself has been an evasion that is not of the teachers’ doing. The underlying theory of the reforms (reflected in state reading standards) has been that schools are teaching skills that can be developed by any suitable content.

That mistaken theory has allowed the problem of grade-by-grade content to be evaded. It was that fundamental mistake about skills that has allowed teachers to be blamed for fundamental failures—the failures of guiding ideas, not of teachers. Elementary school teachers are people who for the most part love children, who want to devote their lives to children’s education, but many find themselves stymied and frustrated in the classroom. They apply the notions received in their training, and do what they are told to do by their administrators, under the everpresent threat of reading tests that do not actually test the content that is being

taught. Under these extremely unfavorable conditions of work, it’s no wonder that teacher unions have pushed back. When the classroom, which should be a daily reward, becomes a purgatory, one turns to contract stipulations.

Democracy mod

Federal education reform collapses democracy – engagement with diverse perspectives and encouragement of collaboration and self-rule upholds the fundamental premises upon which our nation was founded.Robert Kunzman (Indiana University) Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform, Other Education: The Journal of Educational

Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 1(2012), Issue 1 · pp. 121-129.

One of the great drawbacks of education reform is its tendency to discard old forms and practices without adequate recognition of their value and rationale. As we pursue alternatives to the institutional schooling of the past 150 years, we need to consider carefully the purposes they aim to serve. Common schooling emerged in the mid-nineteenth century for a variety of reasons. Some of them were practical in nature, such as the need to provide supervision for children whose parents were now working in factories instead of in the home. Even common schooling’s noble aspirations, such as the preparation of democratic citizens, were

entwined with the paternalistic desire to homogenize recent immigrants. But democracy depends upon the cultivation of a citizenry capable of exercising wise self-rule and committed to active and respectful engagement with diverse perspectives, if it is to survive and thrive. Common schools identified such a vision, although their enactment of it has certainly been flawed. Thanks to residential segregation, most modern public schools are not sites of socioeconomic and cultural diversity; thanks to testing pressures and aversion to controversy, there is relatively little opportunity for students to learn the skills of deliberating about our most profound social disputes. It may very well be that schools aren’t the most effective places to learn to become democratic citizens.

Developing the skills of and the commitment to democracy is probably best achieved amidst authentic engagement in the democratic process – and blurring the boundaries between school, community, and the broader world seems a promising way to encourage more such engagement. But the civic ideal needs to be preserved, promoted, and pursued as part of a rich, multifaceted philosophy of education – it will not maintain itself amidst the pressures for occupational preparation and academic advancement. A new grammar of schooling cannot simply be a free market of consumer choices; it must also uphold a vision for what it means to be a public, and to contribute to the broader social good.

Collapse of democracy causes extinctionLarry Diamond (Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute) 1995 Promoting Democracy in the 1990s

This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the

stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates

that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. lessons of the twentieth century The experience of this century offers important lessons.

Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another . They

do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency . Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own

citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret . Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law,

democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.

Aff answers – Reform Good

A2 reform fatigue – We have to keep trying for better results – question is “does the plan work” – if that happens there is no “reform fatigue”Alan J. Borsuk April 13, 2013 Education reform missing another 'r' word: results http://archive.jsonline.com/news/education/education-reform-missing-another-r-word-results-rf9hgtc-202854471.html

• Challenges to success stories: Chicago, New York, Washington - all three have been described as showing success under hard-charging leaders demanding better results. But leaders of an organization called a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education released test data and other information last week that challenged that story line, saying the rhetoric didn't match the reality and that, in some ways, all three had accomplished little, or even done worse, than other cities. The group, associated with the union-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said places showing more success, including Cincinnati and Charlotte, N.C., emphasize "holistic" approaches to children and their needs, and not test-

oriented approaches. What this all says to me is this: We've got to keep trying to get better results, because, especially in

a place like Milwaukee, the current overall outcomes bode ill for the future. But the emphasis has to be on what actually works. There's so much ideological fighting that just pays lip-service to improvement and quality. We need to work on

boosting the overall soundness of so many children's lives. We need to work on giving them first-rate schools. It needs to be done with eyes open, priorities in order, and the focus on quality. I doubt "reform fatigue" would set in if "reform pursuit" and "reform results" were more energizing.

Debates about education reform are critical – its important to create a stronger school environment.Matthew Tully Published 1:38 p.m. ET Oct. 10, 2014 | Updated 1:38 p.m. ET Oct. 10, 2014Tully: Why education reform is more critical than ever http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/matthew-tully/2014/10/10/tully-education-reform-critical-ever/17038563/

Hubbard is a successful businessman many times over who has worked on economic policy in two presidential administrations. But every time we get together to talk, the issue on the table, and on his mind, is education. You might remember, for instance, a column I wrote a while back about a big-dollar program Hubbard created to reward amazing Indianapolis Public Schools teachers who have overcome tremendous obstacles while serving the most at-risk of students. On Monday, Hubbard wasn’t talking as much about such stories of inspiration. The former director of the National Economic Council was talking about a series of bottom-line numbers that make clear Indiana must push harder to improve its schools. Hubbard sees in these numbers a cause for action. They are indeed a reason for everyone to come together to reach the goal of increasing the number of students who both graduate from high school and have the skills to succeed in college. Hubbard and I talked for 10 minutes about the second page in his stack of papers. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, along with inflation-adjusting calculators, it showed the tremendous decline in real earnings in Indiana over the past three decades. It reinforced what has been clear for a long time: Dropouts and those who have only high-school diplomas no longer have access to the plethora of solid manufacturing jobs that filled so many cities and towns for decades. In 1980, in today’s dollars, the chart showed that a high-school graduate in mid-career could be expected to earn $55,000 annually. That figure has declined by a third in the 34 years since then. The numbers on the page were even worse, of course, for those who fail to earn a high school diploma. But wages also have declined for those with only some college experience or associate’s degrees. “Over the last three decades, 75 percent of Indiana residents have seen wages decline,” Hubbard’s Power Point read, adding that nearly two-thirds of Hoosiers earn at least $10,000 less in today’s dollars than they would have at the dawn of the 1980s. It all points to one thing, Hubbard said: The need for more Hoosiers to earn high-quality, higher-education degrees. That’s the message at the core of the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation, whose board Hubbard sits on. The data Hubbard laid out Monday made me think of Gary, Indiana, the troubled steel town on the shores of Lake Michigan where I lived for the first decade of my life. In my family and in thousands of others, the mills for decades enabled high-school graduates to buy a home, raise a family and build a nest egg. That’s no longer the case. It’s a story of decline that can be retold all across

Indiana. That is what it’s all about, Hubbard said. That is why the debates about education are so crucial. That is why the state

can’t allow another generation of at-risk students to arrive at kindergarten unprepared, and it’s why we can’t let bitter divisions or the so-called “reform-fatigue” that state lawmakers complain about rule the next session. It’s why all families need to be assured of good options for their children, whether that option is a traditional public school, a charter or a scholarship to a private school. The day after my lunch with Hubbard I came across a flood of pieces online that seemed aimed at doing nothing but furthering the divisions that have polluted the education debate of late. Charter school advocates were money-hungry cheats, one piece said. The

education-reform debate was about greed, not kids, said another. And, yes, public school critics have also contributed to the nastiness at times.

Enough already. For goodness sakes, there is plenty of agreement to make up for all the disputes.

More reforms can work – better future for schools is possible with additional action Jal D. Mehta, Frederick M. Hess, & Robert B. Schwartz Published Online: March 28, 2011 The Futures of School Reform: An Introduction and an Invitation If we keep doing what we’re doing, are we going to get there? http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/futures-of-school-reform/invitation.html

At the same time, there is strong reason to think that a more promising future is possible. The work of leading schools—public and public charter—demonstrates that it is possible to do dramatically better.

The work of other leading nations demonstrates that it is possible to create school systems that are both higher-performing and more equitable. Examples from other sectors provide a range of ideas about how to attract and retain talented people, match them to appropriate roles, and create mechanisms for improving quality over time.