More damningly, a new study, by the Economic Policy Institute’s Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, quantifies the negative effects of this test-driven education reform in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago. In these cities, schools whose achievement scores didn’t improve quickly enough to satisfy top officials were shuttered, teachers and principals were fired in droves, and charter schools proliferated. The result, since the much-touted reforms were implemented: Since the supposed reforms, students in those cities have fared worse than those in other urban districts. 

A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.

A new report, released last week, suggests that DC Public Schools’ much lauded reform efforts are  still failing to produce positive results for DC’s students.  Despite changesfirst championed by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee and now by Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the report isn’t pretty:  There was little progress in test scores, costly school closures made capacity problems worse and sent students to poorer-performing schools, restrictive evaluations led to higher turnover of teachers, and racial gaps in achievement grew.

Elaine Weiss, the National Coordinator who wrote the report for theBroader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, said that“instead of continuing Rhee’s reforms, the District should address health and other problems that lead to truancy, and it should make sure the quality of teachers in Anacostia are just as good as those in Chevy Chase”.

Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform  initiatives andspending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don’t work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions,disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver“significantly worse” results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new reportfrom the Economic Policy Institute.)

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.