A New Year for School Reform

Built off of EdWeek's annual Quality Counts report (the new one is out this week, I think tomorrow) and Fordham's recent state by state analysis of progress (for which I wrote a couple of state profiles), this recent editorial from the NYT (A New Year for School Reform) reminds us of several worthwhile things -- most notably that NCLB "did not just drop out of the sky" but rather was the culmination of standards-based reform efforts that have been in vogue for at least 15 years and that minority achievement scores have risen just not fast/enough.

Its proposed remedies aren't to dump NCLB, or abandon its approach, but rather to do what a growing number of folks seem to be calling for in various ways: more rigorous tests, better teacher training, better help for failing schools, and better staffing for low-income schools. Eduwonk calls it "must-read stuff" and points out (as I did below) that the national testing crowd has more problems than solutions.