Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker unveiled another round of largely
gratuitous education reforms this past week. Most bothersome, Gov. Walker
proposes more government-mandated measurements
to allegedly make schools, teachers, and administrators more accountable.
The business-minded
Gov. Walker usually promotes initiatives for smaller government and less regulation—yet paradoxically seems to have no qualms creating more unproven,
bureaucratic regulations for local public education. I am sure Gov. Walker and
his reform supporters will argue that these measures are additional “tools” for
parents in seeking out the best public education for their children. However,
this free-market thinking applied to public education is dubious, at best. I
contend Governor Walker’s accountability measures, like previous attempts at accountability, are a waste of precious
educational energies and dollars.
A
student’s education is largely a complex, intimate, qualitative experience. Students,
parents, and educators working collaboratively is paramount to meaningful
student learning. Expensive, quantitative rating systems proposed by Gov.
Walker are a
blow to the collaborative, intimate, caring communities educators are trying to
create in classrooms and schools. State-mandated regulations are not the answer to the educator
accountability question.
In
fact, if Gov. Walker is sincerely in search of better schools, he and other accountability-obsessed reformers need
to start asking the more important questions. They should not be asking how government
can better regulate schools, but rather how society can better support educating
all students. I yield in this final argument to Chris Nye of the Whole Child Initiative.
We need to shift the
paradigm and refuse to conduct discussion with the implicit agreement that
accountability-focused thinking will ever be able to get to what is most
important in child development and education. Accountability for any large,
bureaucratic system necessarily means quantitative measures. What we want for
our own children...integrity, inquiry, intuition, initiative, creativity…doesn't fit
that paradigm. (Chris Nye, blog posting)
Most educators I engage
with have already made this important paradigm shift for better schooling. Wisconsin
educators now need our elected officials to support us in supporting our
students.
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