This article is part of Re:EDUCATION, an ongoing series on educational innovation. 

Like religion and politics, public education may soon be one of those subjects banned from the dinner table for the sake of family harmony. Few issues can boast so many deeply committed stakeholders with so many intensely opposing points of view. Two recent Big Think features on school reform in New Jersey, under Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf, elicited an unusually high number of passionate reader responses, many of them critical of what have become the mainstream axes of school reform: teacher accountability, data-driven evaluation of school success, and the expansion of the charter school system. 

Joanne Barkan, who writes for Dissent Magazine, sees serious flaws in the "school reform" movement that went national with the 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind, under President George W. Bush. The following are excerpts from her article "Firing Line: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers." 

In a nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers. Democrats from various wings of the party, virtually all Republicans, most think tanks that deal with education, progressive and conservative foundations, a proliferation of nonprofit advocacy organizations, right-wing anti-union groups, hedge fund managers, writers from right leftward, and editorialists in most mainstream media—all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. They also bear much responsibility for the decline of K-12 education overall (about 85 percent of all children attend public schools), to the point that the United States is floundering in the global economy.

In the last few years, attention to the role of public school teachers has escalated into a high-profile, well-financed, and seriously misguided campaign to transform the profession based on this reasoning: if we can place a great teacher in every classroom, the achievement gap between middle-class white students and poor and minority students will close; all students will be prepared to earn a four-year college degree, find a “twenty-first-century job” at a good salary, and help to restore U.S. preeminence in the world economy.

Some Necessary Context

Research shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor determining students’ academic performance. But they are not the only in-school factor: class size and the quality of the school principal, for example, matter a great deal. Most crucially, out-of-school factors—family characteristics such as income and parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing stability, and so on—count for twice as much as all in-school factors. 

Ed reformers have only one response to this reality: anyone who brings up out-of-school factors such as poverty is both defending the status quo of public education and claiming that schools can do nothing to overcome the life circumstances of poor children. The response is silly and, by now, tiresome. Some teachers will certainly be able to help compensate for the family backgrounds and out-of-school environments of some students. But the majority of poor children will not get all the help they need: their numbers are too great, their circumstances too severe, and resources too limited. 

What's the Significance?