The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.
There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.
As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.
This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.
The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help learning. They do neither.