Beyond System Reform

The Need for Greater Innovation in School and Schooling

By Ted Kolderie

It’s easy to see why people might feel that education policy has hit the wall. The federal No Child Left Behind Act is neither reauthorized nor reformed. Growing numbers of schools are reported as “failing.” The despair about high school seems universal. Education is essentially absent from the 2008 presidential debates. Few governors clamor to be an “education governor.”

This causes people to question strategy, to ask: Are the system reforms failing? With standards and accountability, why is performance so flat? Are charter schools fulfilling their promise? Why, as the Manhattan Institute senior fellow Sol Stern asked recently, is choice not showing better results?

System reforms are not failing. It is simply becoming clear that, while critically important, they do not and cannot themselves directly improve achievement. Kids don’t learn from standards, from accountability, from choice, or from charters. It is an error to connect learning to changes in the “architecture” of K-12. Someone could as easily compare scores in one-story vs. two-story buildings. What would that mean? Kids don’t learn from structures. They learn from what they read, see, hear, and do. For achievement to improve, school and...