power to the people

I am seriously tired of our policy elites. (Scroll down for observation re: "[constructivism] works well enough with middle- and upper-middle-class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives.")

Do policy elites have any idea what is actually going on inside public schools?

At all?

Or do they just sit around swapping clichés?

"Middle- and upper-middle class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives:" these are not real people. Yes, I do know a number of moms who are capable of putting dinner on the table at the same time every night, and whose kids have a regular bedtime: feats the one low-income mom I know also managed to pull off when her son was a boy. One of my pals here is so on top of things I have occasionally threatened to ship C. off to her house for a week or two or possibly three. "That will straighten you out," I say.

That mom spent this year teaching her kids math.

A child can have dinner with the family at 5; he can have bedtime at 8; he still needs explicit instruction in arithmetic.

So here's my question.

Why is it that policy elites, unions, and ed schools all have say and we don't?

I'd put money on it that if you scrolled back through the years and compared parent decisions about where and how their kids should be educated^* to the corresponding decisions made for parents by policy elites, union leaders, ed schools and all the rest of the stakeholders in the system,^** you would find that parents have consistently made the better choices.

Here's Joe Williams:

One of the most overlooked tools of modern school reform is the concept of power--who has it, who wants it, and who needs it. One reason so little changes in education is because the people who hold the cards are always the same, no matter what the popular reforms of the day involve. We have tried centralization of decision-making power and decentralization of decision-making power. We've raised standards and enacted zero-tolerance policies. We've beaten into the ground such catch phrases as "lifelong learners" and "capacity building." Yet, in all these reform efforts, parents have never really been allowed to be the ones who get to make the ultimate decision: choosing their child's school. Bureaucrats and politicians always seem to get the last word, even though parents have the best odds of making decisions that put their kids first.

Cheating Our Kids
by Joe Williams
p. 214-215

I've decided to start a collection of what do parents want stories.

This one's my favorite:

One of the most interesting aspects of FT that is rarely discussed in the technical reports is the way schools selected the models they would implement. The model a school adopted was not selected by teachers, administrators, or central office educrats. Parents selected the model. Large assemblies were held where the sponsors of the various models pitched their model to groups of parents comprising a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) for the school. Administrators were usually present at these meetings and tried to influence parents' decisions. Using this selection process, the Direct Instruction model was the most popular model among schools; DI was implemented in more sites during FT than any other model. Yet among educrats, DI was the dark horse. Most educrats' bets would undoubtedly have been placed on any of the models but the Direct Instruction model. The model developed by the Illinois preschool teacher who didn't even have a teaching credential, much less a Ph.D. in education, was not expected by many educrats to amount to much, especially since it seemed largely to contradict most of the current thinking.

The Story Behind Project Follow Through
by Bonnie Grossen

^*on those few occasions when parents were allowed to make a decision, that is
^**note: I exclude students and parents from that category