Monthly Archives: August 2010
On School Reform or When Good Words Go Bad
Education writers, policy-makers, administrators, union leaders, and teachers alike drape their ideas in the rhetoric of reform as if it were some magic cloth immune to criticism. It peremptorily turns the critic of said idea into a behind-the-times hairsplitter who is getting in the way of progress.
The way industrial food corporations like Dole scramble to affix the “organic” label to their product, purveyors of educational policy are all too quick to identify themselves as “reform-minded.” But what does “reform” actually mean? Has the word been so overused as to have lost all meaning (much in the same way the meaning of “organic” has been appropriated to the point of meaninglessness)? Or is it kind of a deceptive concept to begin with? Continue reading
