Everybody on the bandwagon. Instructivism is en fuego!
Sure, Daniel Casse of the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting firm, writing in the Weekly Standard is merely catching up to Sol Stern’s City Journal piece and the attending sturm und drang. (Aside to Petrilli: See?) But it’s national ink for an important idea, which Casse credits to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: you either make curriculum content part of the agenda, or you leave it to “bureaucrats, textbook writers, and political activists” to have their wicked way with what gets taught. “That’s not only what parents really care about,” writes Casse, “it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement.”
“That’s why the next political agenda for school reform, if it ever emerges, will be one that figures out how to redefine the notion of the public school so that traditional school authorities lose their grip on local school systems,” Casse concludes. “In other words, school reform will have to be about not just the way we think public schools ought to be organized, but also what we want them to teach in the classroom at every grade level. Neither the incentivist nor the instructionist side of the debate has been willing to take on both sides of the argument. But Sol Stern’s second thoughts suggest that a successful political movement for better American schools will have to do just that.”
“This might mean a thorough-going charterization program in which every school effectively becomes an “independent” school *competing* for teachers, funding, and students.”
And who would this competition be aimed at? And how would it do this without using market principals?
The idea of education reform reminds me of that game Pachinko. One or more balls (reform ideas) are shot pin-ball style onto the play field. Then the balls hit a series of pin obstacles (name your interest group) to fall harmlessly without scoring. Occasionally, a ball (phonics) will make it through a gate and score a point. However, unlike Pachinko, in the real world of education, even the ball that makes it through can be picked up by a disgruntled vendor and thrown back, and funding for subsequent balls pulled by a back-pocket legislator.
But I digress.
Mike Petrilli, Rick Hess, and I agree, the choice/curriculum bifurcation is a “false dichotomy.” With apologies to E.D. Hirsch, like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other. (Yes, I’m old enough to remember when they really did go together.)