One size doesn't fit all: Steven Hess's big new school reform idea is that no big new school reform idea works everywhere.

• Author: Teles, Steven M.
• Position: 'The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas' - Book review

The Same Thing Over and Over:

How School Reformers Get

Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas

by Frederick M. Hess

Harvard University Press, 304 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Since arriving at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, Rick Hess has become the de facto education spokesman for respectable, reality-based conservatives. His new book, The Same Thing Over and Over Again: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas, is as close as the feverishly productive Hess is ever likely to get to a genuine magnum opus. No one will be shocked that a scholar at AEI has a lot to say that will infuriate liberal defenders of the educational status quo. The book's real surprise is that he is perfectly willing to take on the sacred doctrines of conservative education reformers, arguing that some of them may actually be hampering the process of educational innovation.

Much of what we now accept as fundamental, almost definitional, aspects of schools--that a school must be a wholly geographically based institution, for example--was a "makeshift response to the exigencies of an earlier era," says Hess. Standard "chalk and talk" schooling made sense for a basically agrarian, small-town nation in which communications and transportation were slow and expensive and schools could rely on an army of talented, underpaid women who had few job opportunities outside of teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. The length of the school day is another relic of a time when relatively few women worked outside the house. Today it makes little sense that most schoolchildren are let loose at three p.m. when their parents often don't get home from work until the dinner hour. Our current model is increasingly obsolete in a society where demand for high-skilled labor has accelerated, the population has become urbanized, and young people are as comfortable communicating virtually with people around the world as they are with someone at the front of the class.

Almost all efforts at major education reform over the last few decades have been compromised by the failure to recognize this obsolescence. School districts have accepted (if sometimes reluctantly) demands for higher teacher preparation standards, additional Advanced Placement classes, and a greater focus on the "core" subjects of math, science, English, and history. But more radical changes-such as replacing teachers with technology, using a global labor pool, or hiring a lower-paid staff--face much fiercer opposition...