Education reform is the effort to change a nation’s school systems to better reflect the needs of society. There are many different ways to approach this, and it’s important that leaders choose strategies that are appropriate for their context. For instance, a country with limited resources wouldn’t want to attempt to reform its system by importing a 21st century skills curriculum or project-based learning model from more developed countries.
In the late 1980s, scholars such as Jennifer O’Day and Marshall Smith pushed for what was then called “systemic reform.” They envisioned the tight-loose frame of federal and state rules that now govern the education system being replaced by a looser framework with more emphasis on coherence and alignment. In addition, they advocated the use of a variety of tools for building capacity in the system, including teacher evaluation and development. They also envisioned the development of a system for “consequential accountability,” in which educators would be held accountable for student achievement.
But the enactment of NCLB settled that debate; it put the accountability hawks in the driver’s seat. During the 1990s, standards-based reform moved from being seen as a strategy for building capacity in the system to one that focused on holding schools accountable for results. And it became a political imperative to link that accountability to a broader set of goals.
But a lot of scholarship over the years has failed to detect any significant relationship between states’ adoption of standards-based reform and changes in their students’ achievement. It’s hard to know why; it could be that the quality of standards and tests matters a great deal, but the evidence on this is not particularly robust. Or perhaps it’s a matter of policy implementation; there are lots of cooks in the K-12 kitchen, and many of them have conflicting ideas on what is best for students.