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But as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have neither fulfilled the dream laid at our feet by Jefferson and others nor protected our commitment to this crippled social institution we call universal public education. In fact, we have demonized schools for over a century and sit poised to dismantle our schools without ever having allowed them to succeed. For educators dedicated to the tradition stretching from Jefferson to John Dewey to Paulo Freire, we are faced with a paradox when we confront "What education do our children deserve?" Included in the paradox is that we need education reform because our bureaucratic schools are not supporting the agency of all children for a life as free people and that allowing and pursuing the public and political pursuit of educational reform are masking the need for social reform-addressing the crippling impact of poverty on the lives of children (Berliner, 2009; Hirsch, 2007). Therefore, I hesitate to offer what education our children deserve because I know that without social reform, all education reform will be distorted, if not fruitless. Against calls for education reform, educators must heighten our acknowledgement of and attention to the equity gap that exists in the lives of children, an equity gap that is reflected in the achievement gap in our schools. So as we examine and call for education reform, we must preface that call with context: To achieve the education our children deserve, we must also provide those children with the lives they deserve. 

The "standards-based" K-12 educational reform movement began in the late 1980s and continues today. The original goals of most sets of content standards included an altered form of classroom practice. Educational researchers devoted great effort to developing inquiry-oriented instructional materials and professional development models to support the reform efforts. Although there have been pockets of reform success in some schools and districts, large-scale evaluations of reform efforts indicate that the influence of these efforts on classroom practice and student achievement have been uneven at best. It is our contention that reformers' focus on changing classroom practice is misguided. The standards movement has been hijacked by a "business-scientific" view of schooling that assumes the purpose of education is to prepare students to compete in the global economy. The concepts of assessment and accountability associated with this purpose in the business-scientific view inhibit reform. Researchers committed to reform need to recognize the inherently political nature of reform and work toward a renegotiation of the overarching purpose of education. This also means attending to the consequences of that purpose for school governance, assessment, and accountability.

There is a growing assumption that education reformers are anti-teacher and teachers are anti-reform. Disagreements between these groups have become so heated and so public recently that this seems like a reasonable conclusion. The real story is more complicated. Over the past year, I've had the chance to speak with many people in the education reform world. I have come to believe that most reformers became reformers for the same reasons that most teachers became teachers: a hope that we can provide a higher quality education to a greater number of children in a fairer and more equal way. As a teacher, though, I share my colleagues' frustrations with some of reformers' catchiest feel-good phrases. Teachers are not so much against education reforms as we are downstream from them. We see the way well-meaning changes play out in our schools and classrooms, and often hear troubling subtexts in talking points that sound great on TV. Here are a few examples, along with tips on how to engage teachers in the real conversations that we should be having about these issues.

"Katie Campos will be appointed to serve as Assistant Secretary for Education. Ms. Campos is the co-founder and Executive Director of Buffalo ReformED, a not-for-profit education reform advocacy organization that empowers the community to prioritize education by putting students first. Buffalo ReformED builds and strengthens relationships between school leaders, teachers, parents, community leaders and elected officials in Buffalo. Through Buffalo ReformED, Ms. Campos has emerged as a leading parent advocate in the education reform debate in Buffalo. Previously, Ms. Campos was the Director of Public Affairs for the New York Charter Schools Association, where she was advocated for quality Charter Schools legislation in the NYS Legislature and coordinated grassroots advocacy efforts at individual charter schools in Upstate New York. Ms. Campos also served as the Director of Development at Democrats for Education Reform, where she promoted education reform to elected officials and community groups through proactive outreach and marketing. Ms. Campos earned her B.A. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis."

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

A few weeks ago, the state legislature in Louisiana passed Gov. Bobby Jindal's education reform bill. Louisiana now goes to the head of the class as the state with the most advanced reform package in the nation. Surely, the Obama administration must be pleased, along with the governors of New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Maine, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Unfortunately, "reform" today has become a synonym for dismantling public education and demoralizing teachers. In that sense, Bobby Jindal and his Teach For America/Broad-trained state Commissioner of Education John White are now the leaders of the reform movement. The key elements of Louisiana's reform are: a far-reaching voucher program, for which a majority of students in the state are eligible; a dramatic expansion of charter schools, with the establishment of multiple new chartering authorities; a parent trigger, enabling parents in low-performing public schools to turn their schools into private charters; and a removal of teacher tenure.

With the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, the education reform debate in the U.S. is moving into a second round of Finnish envy-the first being the corporate reformers' distorted claims about international comparisons and the new being calls to examine the full and complex picture of why Finland has achieved both social and education reform that has pushed them to the forefront of education quality. This second round, however, appears to be exposing a nonpartisan failure among all concerned with public education moreso than the needed turn away from corporate education agendas and toward democratic ideals seeking social justice and human agency. Education Week recently reprinted Erin Richards' piece (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) addressing Finland's education system, titled, "Better Teachers, Common Curriculum Are Hallmarks of Finnish Schools." While such coverage should signal the shift needed in discourse about international comparisons and what the U.S. should gain from Finland's social and educational commitments, the headline alone shows that we persist in seeing not what the evidence shows, but what we already assume about schools and reform.

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

School reforms abound today, yet even the boldest and most imaginative among them have produced-at best-marginal gains in student achievement. What America needs in the twenty-first century is a far more profound version of education reform. Instead of shoveling yet more policies, programs, and practices into our current system, we must deepen our understanding of the obstacles to reform that are posed by existing structures, governance arrangements, and power relationships. Yet few education reformers-or public officials-have been willing to delve into this touchy territory. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress have teamed up to tackle these tough issues and ask how our mostly nineteenth-century system of K-12 governance might be modernized and made more receptive to the innumerable changes that have occurred-and need to occur-in the education realm. We have commissioned fifteen first-rate analysts to probe the structural impediments to school reform and to offer provocative alternatives.

If you wanted to reform the legal system, you would probably want to speak to attorneys. If you wanted to reform the way that sports leagues address the problem of concussions, you would want to speak to coaches and players. If you were interested in reforming medicine, you'd probably want to speak to doctors and nurses. But those who want to change the education system want nothing to do with teachers. Pretend-reform governors such as Chris Christie (NJ), Scott Walker (WI) and Rick Scott (FL), entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and politicians including President Obama all believe that they know more about how to improve the public education system in the United States than professional educators who are working with students on a day-to-day basis to educate them and provide them with life skills.

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history. In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits.

The big "reform" trucks have been rollin' down the education highway for nearly a decade now. Public school educators are used to faux reform's inconvenience and injustice by now--and some even accept endless testing, lockstep standards and curriculum, and systematic destruction of public schools as necessary for positive change. Parents and grandparents may like their children's schools and teachers, but have absorbed the incessant media drumbeat: public education has failed. Out with the old! Something Must Be Done! If--like me--you still believe that public education is a civic good, an idea perfectly resonant with democratic equality, you're probably wondering if there's anything that can stop the big "reform" trucks. Those massive, exceptionally well-funded "reform" trucks with their professional media budgets, paid commentary and slick political arms. I can tell you this: it won't be teachers alone who turn back the tide of "reform." Teachers have been backed into a corner, painted as unionists bent on their own security (whether they pay dues or not), unwilling to be "accountable." They have been replaced, willy-nilly, by untrained temps--without retaliatory strike-back from their national union leaders. They have been publicly humiliated by their own cities and media outlets, not to mention the Secretary of Education.

If you thought you knew everything about the remarkable transformation of Finland's schools from mediocre to one of the top performing school systems in the world, think again.  Native Finn Pasi Sahlberg (educator, researcher, advisor on global education reform,  and Director General of CIMO in Helsinki, Finland),  who has lived and closely studied this remarkable reformation, tells the full story in his newly released book, Finnish Lessons  - What can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?  Sahlberg shows how the Finnish ways of improving schools differ from the global educational reform movement and from the North American educational policies and reform strategies.  It's a wake-up call for all countries around the world who aspire to achieve excellence.

Education reformers have attempted to improve the quality of teachers by changing public policy with questionable initiatives and by insisting, falsely, that educators are to blame for many of the public education system's - and the country's - problems. School reformers - and some of the billionaires who fund their efforts - have ignored research about the factors that go into student achievement and have decided to impose their own "magic formulas" for determining who is a good teacher and who is a bad one. Of course everyone wants all students to have great teachers, and it is important to work towards that goal. It is important, too, to recognize that family structure, poverty, and other outside influences are equally if not more influential in how well a student does in school. The bottom line is that what is being done in the name of school reform is creating a profession where the quality of teachers is decreasing. Let's look at five ways school reform is hurting teacher quality

"There are several similarities between the bipartisan welfare reform movement of the 1990s and the general thrust of the education reform movement happening today. For example, there is the reliance on market-based mechanisms to "cure" longstanding problems, and the unusually strong liberal-conservative alliance of the proponents. Nevertheless, while calling education reform "the new welfare reform" might be a good soundbyte, it would also take the analogy way too far."

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

what better way to capture the Bizarro world of education reform than with a serious work of journalism, disguised as a comic? Our three-part series - published over the next three months - is not intended to be funny, but rather, to pull back the progressive propaganda disguising the neoliberal, corporate nature of education reform. Our goal is to expose the free-market policies that really make up "education reform"; how these policies threaten our public education; who supports these policies; and, ultimately, what we might be able to do about the "Disaster Capitalism Curriculum."

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

Why have our efforts fallen short? Over the past fifty years, U.S. school reform has been dominated by three major movements, aimed at promoting equity, increasing school choice, and using academic standards to leverage improvement. While all three have changed schooling in notable ways, none has brought about the needed level of general improvements because they mostly sought to improve education from the outside rather than the inside. To make real progress, we will have to think and act much more audaciously. The next round of reform must focus on the essentials of education-the quality of teaching and curriculum, and the means of funding them. Moreover, if we truly want to improve our schools sooner than later, then we must declare a good education to be a civil right for every child. This article explains the shortcomings of the three major reforms and proposes a bolder approach for future school reform. The current campaign for the presidency presents an opportunity to discuss this improvement agenda.