{"id":2271,"date":"2012-11-28T15:22:31","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T19:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coreeducationllc.com\/blog2\/?p=2271"},"modified":"2020-03-03T18:47:55","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T22:47:55","slug":"from-tinkering-to-utopia-to-remaking-american-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coreeducationllc.com\/blog2\/from-tinkering-to-utopia-to-remaking-american-education\/","title":{"rendered":"From ‘Tinkering to Utopia’ to ‘Remaking American Education’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jal Mehta, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-editor of The Futures of School Reform<\/a><\/em> (2012), offers a clarion call to systematic educational reform in the United States.\u00a0 Mehta makes three key points in his article for the American Enterprise Institute<\/a>:<\/p>\n

1. Many efforts to reform American schooling over the past few decades have done little to address substantial student achievement gaps or improve the US educational ranking internationally.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mehta cites the trend toward small-scale reform going back 30 years to A Nation at Risk<\/em>, but is skeptical about those reforms made in that time due to continued high dropout rates, sustained educational differences based on race and class, and often worsening statistics about American educational rankings compared with those of other countries.<\/p>\n

2. Existing efforts make limited headway because they do not seek to fundamentally change the core structure of American schooling.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mehta sums up his position on the small-scale changes of the last thirty years as \u201cso little real reform, so little real change.\u201d For Mehta, beyond the negative trends cited above, we should also understand the failure of previous American educational reforms because the system in which they are taking place is fundamentally flawed.\u00a0 Mehta observes that many small-scale model reforms have worked remarkably well, but that they did not work when scaled up in larger settings.\u00a0 Because Mehta sees this as a trend, he places the blame for failure not on the particular reforms themselves, but on the system in which these reforms are seeking to bring change.<\/p>\n

3. Substantial change is possible if reformers craft a longer-term strategy to alter the school system itself, and possible pathways that could fundamentally improve American schooling include the following:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n