The Three Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform

The Three Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform

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Previous attempts to reform our education system in America have only piled more money on the heap of a broken system. We need transformative changes, not additive ones.There are three big culprits in American education policy that are crippling the ability of our schools to respond to today’s challenges:

1. Our policy of “buying reform” – the time-honored practice of sugarcoating tough reforms with money.
2. The lack of an adequate way for schools to measure teacher performance.
3. The fact that education policy is by its nature political, conservative, and change-averse.

We’ve created an environment in which our schools can’t really respond to the demands for improved student performance, or think creatively about productivity-enhancing reforms. At the very time we need our schools to become more effective and more agile for the job we need them to do tomorrow they are still saddled with yesterday’s constraints.