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Education Reform In The News
REFORMERS HAVE A LONG, PROUD HISTORY
February 2003
As much as Americans generally love underdogs, in politics the culture is to avoid upsetting the status quo. Activists who actually organize themselves enough to become effective voices for any reform disliked by the bureaucracy and its hangers-on — especially in areas such as taxes, spending and education — soon enough find themselves vilified in the mainstream media and in the halls of power.
In a short essay of “reflections” upon the 10th anniversary of the group she founded, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform offers an important insight for would-be government reformers in any realm, not just education: “We’ve learned ... that the Establishment want you to believe you ... don’t understand what’s really happening in schools and are wed to the wrong organizations. They also talk about how reformers are dividing rather than uniting, and that if we all just came together, we could make beautiful music.
“What they would really like is not consensus, but that we all go away. It’s convenient and easy never to have detractors.” Indeed. But among the things that have made this a great nation is our freedom to challenge the status quo, particularly in the public arena. Pick your favorite reform in American history, and somewhere along the line it is likely that the incumbent powers denounced the reformers as mean and divisive and suggested that they weren’t credible because they operated outside the existing consensus.
As for the Center for Education Reform, the proof of its effectiveness is the thousands of charter schools and other worthwhile choice-oriented education experiments throughout the country that have benefited enormously from the CER’s research and counsel.
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This article has appeared in:
Daily Mining Gazette — Houghton, MI
Sentinel — Lewistown, PA
Inter-Mountain — Elkins,
West Virginia Intelligencer — Wheeling, WV
Observer — Dunkirk, NY
See also Jeanne Allen's Reflections in CER's December 2002 Monthly Letter to Friends.