Introduction

The articles in this issue and in the next two issues of Dissent are an attempt to begin an alternative reform discussion. Too often those who are not satisfied with the state of public education, but who dissent from the test-driven, market-oriented thrust of reform, are branded supporters of the status quo. This is inaccurate. In fact, we see both strengths and weaknesses in the current educational reform movement. Its strengths are its refusal to be satisfied with the status quo and its commitment to the idea that all children should receive a quality education and that all of them have a capacity to learn and grow, whatever their ethnicity or the economic circumstances of their parents. But the reform movement also has significant weaknesses. One of these is a narrowly economistic view of the purposes of education or, to put it a little differently, a subordination of the democratic vision of education for citizenship that has been integral to the purposes of American public education since the days of its origins in the nineteenth century. A second problem has been an overreliance on testing as the technology that will fix American education.