Nothing I have read in The Washington Post lately has been more lucid and bracing than Patrick Welsh’s assault on catch-phrase school reforms in the Sept. 29 edition of the Outlook section. It was vintage Welsh — detailed, angry, literate. It’s what you expect from one of our best education writers and high school teachers. He added a dash of melancholy for fans like me as we learned he had just retired after 43 years at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.
My only complaint about the piece is that it did not celebrate Welsh or his school enough. It would be out of character for him to mention his own accomplishments. He did say how superb several of his colleagues on T.C. Williams’s faculty have been, but someone reading his piece too fast might think that dumb programs such as Effective Schools, SPONGE and Standard-Based Education had turned T.C. Williams into a bad school. The truth is that they failed to diminish a great school.