It is constantly claimed from many quarters that America’s schools aren’t good enough, aren’t as good as they should be. I don’t know. There’s always room for improvement in anything we do. But I not sure we should expect much improvement by flailing about blindly. Sure, we have international comparisons that show we’re not on top. Sure, we’d like to be on top. Sure, we have things to learn from other educational systems in other countries. But I don’t think there is any obvious plan. Adopting practices from foreign school systems that do well has the problem that what works well in one culture may not work well in another culture.

Maybe, as Finn says, American education is like American governance in 1785, but maybe American education is like democracy, inefficient, messy, slow, contentious, cumbersome, and frustrating, but better than any alternative for our culture.

What we need are central offices, and presumably state offices and school leaders who can be consumers of school reform evidence. We are a long way from that. But at least that goal would be doable.

Of course, the same applies to teachers. Ten years ago we were supposed to be teachers. Now we’re supposed to guarantee the success of all of our students? What has happened in the past decade that would allow good teachers – who didn’t save every kid in the past – to do that now?

One third of the students at Boston Latin and Lowell in S.F. and more than one quarter of the students at Stuyvesant in NYC are from low-income families. These kids are getting a way better education at their exam schools than they would if forced to attend their neighborhood schools. How many more poor but bright kids are having their potentials wasted by the scarcity of exam schools in the U.S.?

It’s ridiculous that of the 16 elementary schools in my district, the only decent one is in the neighborhood where homes go for well over $1.5 million. I guarantee that if they turned that school into a charter and held an entrance exam, my child would score better than 95+% of the kids who are currently enrolled. Admission to good schools should be based on merit NOT the finances of the child’s parents…

Accountability is one thing. Calling and demanding actions that compromise the institutional missions of schools, however, are another–and this is the type of ‘accountability’ most voters demand of their communities’ schools. In my time as a teacher, such ‘accountability’ measures, if they made it to the school board, forced abolishment of grade penalties for excessive truancies, cleansed Language Arts curriculums of ‘offensive’ texts, removed all teeth from a zero-tolerance weapons policy, etc., etc., etc.

Schools, of course, should not be left off the hook. Their continued inability to put necessary sticks in the sand is the main reason they have lost all sense of center, guided instead by the their constituencies’ many grinding axes.

I read it and found, as with many things he writes, that Finn’s sppech was thoughtful and provocative.

I assume the reason the TV show bookers did not immediately call me to ask if I could appear to discuss it was that the President had sucked all the air out of the room with his Pentathalon (six if you include Letterman, I guess)

Or maybe Finn’s hit the nail on the head when he said “People are sick of the topic, weary of promises, tired of plans and schemes and initiatives.” So weary in fact that they did not even respond to his speech?

Here in Gotham the Mayor seems (in part by his recent poaching of Chris Serf from Tweed) to think that ed reform is a plank that will serve him well in his bid for a third term. But maybe NYC is the exception that proves the rule that Americans are generally weary of Ed reform?