Improving Schools: Focus on What's Best for Kids, Not Most Convenient for Adults

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : Second, when discussing problems and solutions, the chapter starts with the point that improving student academic outcomes is the central purpose of public education and that other values and "community interests" are of secondary importance.
57% : "Whether school board elections are democratic tells us absolutely noth- ing about whether public schools are doing a good job delivering on their core mission [of educating kids]."
57% : As agencies of government (subject to the demands of interest groups and voters), public schools will always be in the political arena.
57% : And to be sure, many adults will have a vested interest in upholding school board governance and in maintaining the traditional district/lEA as the sole provider of public education.
53% : They remind us once more that the decentralized nature of K-12 politics and governance too often influences a child's chances of receiving a high-quality education and obtaining a shot at upward mobility in this patchwork quilt we call public education in the United States.
52% : In other words, when policymakers sit down to evaluate K-12 governance models, they should recognize the difference between democratic procedures (important) and the substantive outcomes that public education is trying to achieve: creating an educated populace that is equipped to participate in self-governance (most important).
48% : Later, in the early twentieth century (1890-1930), the moral concerns that Kogan highlights here were superseded by more modern, secular ones: leaning on public schools to assimilate immi- grants and prepare workers for a second wave of industrialization.
45% : For example, in their pathbreaking book Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe presaged their indictment of public education at the end of the 1980s by noting: "[The one best system] is so thoroughly taken for granted that it virtually defines what Americans mean by democratic governance of the public schools.
44% : Given the immense size and scale of public education in the united States, it would be foolish and impractical to conclude this retrospective by recommending that a single governance model be applied everywhere.

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