The Magazine

School Wars

The two sides of the education debate.

Sep 13, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 01 • By JUSTIN TORRES
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

Common Sense School Reform

by Frederick M. Hess

Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., $26.95

Class and Schools

Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap

by Richard Rothstein

Economic Policy Institute, 210 pp., $17.95

SEASONS COME AND SEASONS GO, but the education mess endures. Of the nation's fourth- and eighth-grade public-school students, only a third are "proficient" in reading or math, as defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Math scores have been on a slight but unmistakable upswing since 1990, but reading scores have remained stubbornly flat.)

And the achievement gap between poor and minority students on the one hand, and their white, wealthier fellows on the other, remains appallingly wide and seemingly impervious to efforts to narrow it. The average African-American twelfth-grade student, for example, reads at an eighth-grade level.

With the education mess come the education wars, which also have a life of their own. On one side are the vast majority of educators, administrators, and education specialists. They all come out of the progressive tradition of John Dewey, and they explain the present system's shortcomings as largely the result of inadequate funding and a reflection of the larger society's inequities. On the other side are education reformers of a traditionalist bent, who would remake the system with school-choice schemes, or reforms designed to wring efficiencies out of the vast bureaucratic wasteland that is public education. The battle has been going for two decades, with traditionalists making halting gains but no real victory in sight.

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy