Alliance for Learning: 'We Have to Get Off Our High Horses'

By Robert Zemsky

For more than two decades, we in higher education have been told to help fix the nation's primary and secondary schools. Because we have been so fundamentally a part of the problem, we were told, successful school reform could only proceed if we recast our own educational missions.

We have been urged to toughen our own standards, to pay greater attention to educational outcomes, to redesign our curricula to help the United States again become a nation of learners. We have been reminded that our own privileged position can become untenable if we persist in seeing school reform as someone else's problem; we have been shown just how easy it is to shift public funds away from higher education in favor of more generous budgets for equally strapped public schools.

Yet, still, we have...