Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

By Rona Wilensky

As a principal of a small, innovative public high school of choice and as a trained economist, I've read with great interest the current Education Week series on reform efforts at the high school level. But I have found myself in profound disagreement with most of the points made and the experts quoted. As a report on the current state of policy debate in the field, the articles are accurate. But as a description of the reality of American education and economic life, the picture drawn is unrelated to the everyday realities of schools or the needs and desires of the American people.

To see how fundamentally flawed the debate over high school change is, we need only look at three of the assumptions behind proposals cited by the experts. The first two concern the relationship between educational achievement and the economy; the last treats the relationship between schools and economic inequality. These assumptions have entered the national dialogue as compelling, if mistaken, stories that serve as the foundation of the current mythology of school reform.

The first erroneous assumption comes directly from the 1983 report that set the education reform movement in motion, A Nation at Risk . This report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education put its conclusions in the most alarming terms: The United States must educate its citizens to much higher levels in order for the economy to remain competitive with the rest of the world. The Japanese, the Europeans, the Soviets, and the Asians all produce workers who are better educated and therefore more competitive in the global marketplace. For two decades, we have been told that countries with better-educated...