Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bennett lashed out at those who he believes are to blame: the "educational establishment," and, particularly, teachers' unions. "You're standing in the doorways, you're blocking up the halls of education reform," he charged. Bennett assailed those who engage in what he calls "opposition by extortion, the false claim that to fix our schools will first require a fortune in new funding." Instead, Bennett somewhat vaguely recommends strengthening curriculums, rewarding good teachers and principals, and instituting "accountability" throughout the education system...
...critics agree that American schools need further improvement. The past five years has indeed brought about tighter graduation requirements and stricter teacher standards backed by better pay. But most of the progress has come in affluent areas, where students are best equipped to respond to increased demands. "The reform movement has been most successful with those students who need it the least," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For inner-city students there has been little change. "Reforms were aimed at middle-class schools," notes Gary Orfield, an urban-education expert...
Nowhere is this more evident than in Chicago. Despite what Superintendent of Schools Manford Byrd calls a "flurry of ((reform)) activity," studies show that the dropout rate remains 46% overall and 56% for minorities. Earlier this year, Bennett declared Chicago schools to be the nation's worst. Critics claim that the reforms have been little more than lip service from a bureaucracy with no intention of changing. Those innovations that have made it into the classroom may have done more harm than good. The back-to-basics emphasis, for instance, makes no sense in a system that has already...
...most of the thrust for reform has come from Governors, legislators and businessmen concerned about a shrinking pool of qualified workers. "Reform has been a sort of top-down initiative," says John Moore, chairman of the department of education at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Teachers were never brought into it." As a result, while progress was made, many reforms were misguided. In Houston, for instance, state rules requiring failing students to be tutored foundered because of problems in scheduling the sessions and the fact that many students failed to show...
Ultimately, most educators agree, if reform is to have any lasting success, it will have to turn away from such externally imposed regulations and encourage change from within. Principals and teachers, says P. Michael Timpane, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, "have got to be at the center of reform." Some localities have already realized this. In New Jersey, Commissioner of Education Saul Cooperman has sought to create teacher incentives, including bonuses for success in inner-city schools and grants for top teachers to spend in classrooms as they wish. Last fall Rochester teachers signed an innovative three-year...