School reform: history, approaches, and outcomes

¶ … nature of school reform. There is more of an emphasis, however, on political reform then there is on the reform of the teachers. The article discusses this by showing that the teaching community can work with those in the political area so that policies that they set can be adapted and used correctly. In the beginning of the article, the author discusses many of the different reform movements. These began with the Platoon School back in the 1970s. The article then moves on to some of the political standards that have been tried and utilized throughout the history of education. Often, many of these are used by both politicians and researchers when they are attempting to decide whether a particular school program is going to be a success or failure.

After a re-examination of these various standards, social issues that usually relate to school reform are also discussed. Many of these relied almost entirely on standardized testing procedures to get information about how well a school program was doing. Unfortunately, standardized testing is only one method of measuring a child's progress, and this quite often did not give educators or politicians a clear picture of whether a program was actually succeeding. Many of the political reforms that are tried become part of the educators' tools and therefore they will be integrated into much of what the educational community considers important.