In today's news, Illinois Schools Superintendent Christopher Koch pointed out that funding cuts are bad for education reform. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of the Illinois reforms to begin with (the big focus was on preventing teacher strikes and paying teachers for high test scores), but Koch is right that education reform is going to take some serious funding.
Real reform, like the suggestions from Iowa's roundtables and the initiatives AFT president Randi Weingarten highlighted last week at the AFT Teach conference, will require real funding. Selling this reality to parents, pundits, politicians, and private sector CEOs will be the biggest challenge we'll face in achieving the long-term goal of improving the US education system to rival those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea.
While we work on the mid-term goal of selling folks on the idea of higher taxes to fund real school reform, we could act in the short-term to divert funding away from unproven and disproved reform efforts, such as bonus pay for high test scores and developing standardized tests for preschoolers.
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