Education showdown: the irresistible force of school reform meets the immovable object of teachers unions.
Reason › Vol. 43 Nbr. 1, May 2011
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Education showdown: the irresistible force of school reform meets the immovable object of teachers unions.
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"WHEN OPRAH STARTS TALKING about it, we're almost there" says Julio Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options. School choice is "definitely a mainstream topic right now" Fuentes crows at National School Choice Week festivities in Washington, D.C., in January. "Five or six years ago, when I got into this movement, we were viewed as the crazy voucher folks in Florida running around trying to pass legislation. Now Oprah is talking about it, so we're no longer crazy. We're making sense. We're making progress." Oprah isn't alone in her late-breaking interest in education reform. Documentaries about school choice are popping up like pimples on a middle school boy, first among them the wildly successful, Sundance-winning Waiting for "Superman," by director David Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame. President Barack Obama spent 1,000 words of his 7,000-word State of the Union address this year on schools, referring to public education as "a system that's not working." Secretary of Education Arne Duncan kicked off the new year by writing in The Washington Post that "few areas arc more suited for bipartisan action than education reform." Old Democratic mayors arc saying nice things about reform, and new Republican governors arc saying mean things about the stares quo. And then there's Oprah, who devoted one of her final episodes to school reform. Hcr guests included Guggenheim, education technology champion Bill Gates, and the controversial former chancellor of the District of Columbia's public schools, Michelle Rhee. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act--rechristened No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001--is overdue for congressional reauthorization. On the state level, tight budgets and partisan rivalries are driving a reevaluation of how education money is spent. Policy makers are taking a fresh look at the way teachers are compensated, considering drastic reductions in adm...See the full content of this document
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