food fight!

Is School Choice Enough?

from Hirsch's take:

The choice movement is a structural approach. It relies on markets to improve outcomes, not venturing to offer guidance on precisely what the schools should be teaching. Such guidance would go against the “genius of the market” approach, which is to refrain from top-down interference with curriculum. Stern shows—rightly, I believe—that this is a fundamental failing of the choice movement.

But market-based “choice” is not the only structural reform of the recent past that has ignored substance. The government-funded “whole-school-reform” project was another metastructure that essentially said, “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” not concerning itself with what kinds of flowers. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law uses carrots and sticks to induce gains in reading and math. But it, too, is a structural approach, grandly leaving to states the details about what is taught and learned. The one area where the law does opine on substance—regarding the teaching of phonics—is the one area where genuine improvement has taken place in the earliest grades.

Let’s not forget the structural approach of the state-standards movement, either. Though state standards are, in my view, potentially the most promising reform project, they decline to offer guidance on the substance of what is taught and learned in the language arts, the most important area of early schooling.

[snip]

And then there’s the structural orientation of the dominant theories within the educational establishment—that activities, rather than “mere facts” or a “rote-learned” academic curriculum, will induce academic progress, and that children’s natural development will allow them to gain or “construct” the needed knowledge.

All of these ideas leave the grade-by-grade specifics of the curriculum to be determined by some quasi-divine agency—the magic of the market, the wisdom of the locality, the nature of the child—in short, not mere policy makers, but somebody or something else.

Yet the grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is.

I alternate between the Sol Stern camp and the wild-eyed radical John Taylor Gatto give the money to the homeschoolers and let's be done with the whole thing camp.

Let a thousand homeschools bloom.

That's what I say.

Depending on the day and the hour, of course.