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Trying to satisfy too many agendas slows school reform |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Despite investments, community goodwill and some good ideas, a vexing question remains in the age of school reform: Why has so much hope and effort led to disappointment? Beginning in the late 1980s, the Chicago Public Schools, like many urban schools systems, launched a series of initiatives to reorganize schools, improve teaching and encourage parental participation. The changes in Chicago not always have met the expectations of proponents, wrote Charles Payne in his new book, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools A lack of trust among teachers and principals and parents frequently creates dysfunction in schools, noted Payne. Tension among members of the business community, who promote sound management and accountability, and progressive educators, who favor a student-centered agenda, also has left the promise of reform unfulfilled. The Consortium on Chicago School Research (at the University of Chicago) is the closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project on urban schools, and from its inception, it has maintained a commitment to combining quantitative and qualitative work, affording its work a complexity that cannot be achieved when the two are separated," Payne said. It led to a relationship between the schools and research community rarely seen among the nation's largest school systems. Payne, who is a member of the University's Committee on Education, uses findings from the consortium, his research and reporting by the city's media to explore the problems that plague this school system and others. In his visits to schools, Payne learned that social relationships were key to student success.
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