As I wrote about recently, the “science of reading” movement fits into a 40-plus year cycle of neoliberal (conservative) education reform.

However, using terms such as “neoliberal” or “conservative” means very little to most people since these are broad (and often shifting) terms about ideologies or beliefs.

Education reform since the early 1980s has been almost entirely conservative in the following ways:

• The structure of reform has been entirely accountability, which has often been punitive (school report cards and grades that have led to school takeovers, value-added evaluation of teachers that resulted in ranking and firing teachers, exit exams that kept students from graduating, grade retention, etc.).
• Reform has used standardized testing to justify reform and to monitor reform outcomes despite well-known concerns about inequity in such testing.
• Reform has been entirely in-school only, depending on and perpetuating education guru marketing such as that by Hattie (although his research and ideologies [can’t do anything about poverty] have been refuted).
• The rhetoric around reform has depended on a false crisis/miracle dynamic without either being verified by evidence; reform has primarily been perpetuated by political rhetoric and media stories.
• Reform has surrendered public institutions (schools) to the marketplace, choosing indirect reform over directly reforming how schools works or addressing any social inequity that is reflected in school data.
• Reform is grounded in rugged individualism myths—students and teachers just need to work harder (and they will do so only if held accountable), downplaying or ignoring systemic forces.
• Reform is often trapped in over-sold programs and one-size-fits all approaches that seem more efficient.
• Reform reaches for technology at the expense of teacher autonomy and authority as well as individual student needs.

Progressive education has never really been practiced in the US, and the US has certainly never implemented progressive education reform.

Considering what progressive education reform would entail may help clarify how our current cycle of education reform is essentially conservative. Progressive education reform would include the following:

• Acknowledging that out-of-school factors (systemic forces) have the greatest impact on measurable student achievement, progressive education reform would reject either/or thinking and advance social reform and in-school reform grounded in equity, and not accountability.
• Progressive education reform would reduce or eliminate the role of standardized testing in driving what reforms are needed and how well reforms work. Evidence for effective teaching and student learning would be much more broadly and deeply defined.
• Collaboration, community, and transparency would replace punitive accountability.
• Aspirational and idealistic outcome goals would be replaced by patience and realistic expectations for human behavior.
• Progressive education reform would center individual student needs and teacher autonomy over market and political interests.
• Progressive education reform would reject one-size-fits all solutions, crisis rhetoric, and competitive models that pit stakeholders against each others’ interests.
• Progressive education reform would be critically skeptical of fads and pre-packaged programs.
• Progressive education reform would put individual freedom and democracy above market/career goals.

I believe progressive (and especially critically progressive) education reform has great promise for serving the needs of students and society much better than our schools have done historically or currently.

I also recognize that we lack the political or public will to set aside our grounding of neoliberal/conservative ideologies.

Ironically, too often people are not well educated enough to step back and challenge their beliefs even as all the evidence around them shows those beliefs are not working.

I suspect that even though we find ourselves in a very deep neoliberal education reform hole, we are going to just keep digging.