School Reform

The current school reform or excellence movement may be dated from the National Commission on Excellence's 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk. The decline of high school student test scores in the United States had been a troublesome news item for a number of years by that time. But now middle-class parents were becoming apprehensive about their children's preparedness to compete for admission to the nation's more prestigious colleges and universities; enrollment in private schools was increasing dramatically. In addition, many Americans were alarmed at the perceived decline in the quality of our civic and political life and discourse, and worried that as a nation we were becoming morally adrift. The finger of blame was pointed at the schools.

Although scholars and researchers in the fields of school administration, psychology, sociology, testing and evaluation, curriculum theory, and learning and instruction, among other specialists in schools of education, have built their careers around studying effective schools and methods of improving the educational process, this latest school reform movement was not led by these education specialists. Rather, leadership of the reform movement was assumed by the U.S. Office of Education-first under Terrel H. Bell and then under his successor, William J. Bennett-allied with an impressive array of elected officials, especially state governors and their legislatures, and foundation heads and civic and business leaders outside the education profession in general and schools of education in particular. This latter point is the one we wish to stress here. The involvement of faculties of schools of education-we will call them "educationists" for short-in the school reform movement has so far been negligible.

First, though university-affiliated schools of education presumably have the expertise needed to address the problems of education, the reward structure for faculty is based upon research and scholarly publication. Faculty members at such institutions are reluctant to slow down or postpone their discipline-oriented research and publication agendas in order to focus upon the ramifications and implications of their research for public school policy and practice because they may then suffer delays in promotion or in receiving tenure.

Second, the participation of schools of education and professors of education in the school reform movement seems to be neither valued nor wanted by reformers. We think it fair to state that by and large the current school reform movement views educationists as an obstacle, barrier, or source of resistance to reform. A Nation at Risk simply dismissed the professional education community from its purview. Some school reformers use a pre-emptive strike strategy. According to California State School Superintendent Bill Honig, "Many of the reform steps we have taken in California have had their critics in the schools of education, some of whom have been downright personally abrasive in their attacks." Some of the most visible and vocal of the school reformers assume a more explicit adversarial stance toward educationists.

For all these reasons, if school of education faculty have greeted the school reform movement with hostility or anxious silence or suspicion, again, it is not surprising. Educationists may talk to one another about the school reform movement in books and in the professional educational journals, but in the public debate about school reform, with some notable exceptions, their voices have been very quiet. This is where this volume hopes to make its contribution. Its aim is to give educationists in at least one school of education, UCLA's Graduate School of Education, a chance to join the debate. The school reform movement has in part been aimed at making the public more aware of educational issues and at placing the issue of educational excellence high on the national agenda.