I’m so glad that Sol Stern has written this piece.
The comeback to it that I am already hearing from die-hard choice advocates is: well, the non-choice schools haven’t done so well either! This is an argument?
Stern’s point goes far deeper than that — to doubt whether any of the primarily structural approaches to school improvement are promising, after all. His view: we need to talk about substance not structure.
The choice movement is a structural approach. It relies on market-theory to improve outcomes, not venturing to offer guidance on precisely what the schools need to be teaching. That would go against the genius of the market approach, which is to refrain from top-down interference into what needs to be taught and learned in the schools. Stern rightly shows that this is a fundamental failing in the choice movement.
But market-based “choice” is not the only structural reform of the recent past that has refrained from actually concerning itself with the substance of what is taught and learned in school. There was the government-funded whole-school-reform project. It too was a meta-structure that said “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” thus rendering itself superior to any particular substantive notion of what needed to be taught and learned in the school.
Continue reading ‘On Sol Stern’s City Journal Piece: Substance Trumps Structure’
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