Ask school “reform” advocates why, and they will eventually arrive at something like “we’re doing this for the kids”. It may come after the economic and geo-political reasoning but “the children” will be there somewhere.

However, I wonder if most school reform proposals are more about adults than the kids.

Too many adults view learning, at least at the K12 level, in very narrow terms. They have a vision of school that is firmly rooted in the classrooms they sat in twenty, thirty, forty years ago and they expect to see largely the same when they enter one today. Maybe a few computers or other technology, but the same curriculum and pedagogy that was good enough for them.

Charter schools, for example, rarely deviate far from the standard teacher-directed model of our memories. Some will add more of it in terms of an extended school day or Saturdays. But more is better, right? Plenty of practice is all that is needed to learn something. Just ignore the graft and corruption of public monies going on in the business office.

We certainly don’t want to change the century-old standard curriculum. Small shifts in the topics studied are ok but few reform proposals address whether the traditional subject silos – English, math, science, social studies, maybe “foreign” languages, art, PE – need to be modified. Or whether the walls between them need to be completely torn away and drastically re-thought for this “information” age.

Programmed/individualized learning? Standardized testing? We automate the production line and run regular quality control assessments to provide a more consistent product. Similar technology should work with school. Just ignore the fact that the “product” here are kids, and learning is a very personal, inconsistent, and messy process.

Merit pay, vouchers, value-add evaluation. Competition is good for business, many reformers know business very well, schools should be run like businesses, therefore all of these reforms that encourage “competition” must be good.

Don’t bother asking anyone with current teaching experience about all this. We need to standardize teachers as much as we do their instruction.

In addition to professional educators, there’s another important voice – the most important voice – completely missing from the school reform discussion: students. Current students, recent graduates, and especially kids for whom the formal school system didn’t work for one reason or another. We never ask them about how the experience could be change and then actually listen to them (as Will did recently).

As a result, changes to our education system are driven by adults, often ones in positions of privilege with little to no education experience beyond sitting in classrooms for decades, who know that learning in the real world is nothing like the structures and content they are proposing.

But they start with an assumption that the traditional school format through which they passed must be the correct one for kids twenty, thirty, forty years later. The familiar learning process from their childhood must the correct one for them as well.

So, tell me again, who is this reform for?