Schools Matter: How Can Schools Be Accountable?

Schools Matter is a prolific and provocative Ed blog that espouses views similar to ours on many school issues such as high stakes testing, charters, vouchers, privatization, and public school abolitionism. Check it out. I'm undoubtedly more moderate on most issues than they are, but I read the log and applaud his efforts.

Including this recent post, "How Can Schools Be Accountable?" which counters the "schools are failing" chorus with this nugget:

Indeed, you've heard policy-makers of all stripes, conservative and liberal, say something like what Moe argues: huge amounts of money have been invested in school, more than has ever been invested -- literally mountains and mountains of cash -- and we have nothing to show.

But we actually have LOTS to show.

• more students than ever before are attending public schools, hitting new record enrollment levels in the mid-1990s
• more students than ever before are graduating from schools
• more students than ever before are taking advanced classes (in 1982, 11 percent of high school graduates completed courses like trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. By 1998, 27 percent had completed that type of advanced coursework. Over the same period, the percentage taking advanced science courses rose from 31 percent to 60 percent.)
• schools are performing more services for students than ever before

The post makes another point that we've hammered on here and on the sfschools list, that schools are being overloaded with all manner of extraneous mandates and social service functions that distract and dilute their core responsibility —to educate our students. Check it out.

Time to add this blog (and Edspresso) to our blogroll.