Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

In DC, policymakers think that if we can only have high enough standards, tough enough tests, and hold people accountable, we can close the achievement gap. And it hasn't happened. Yet the new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is based on the same test-based and market-driven framework and ideology, except it lets the states do it.

One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change.

Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.

The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountability.

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

The ladder was there, from the gutter to the university, and for those stalwart enough to ascend it, the schools were a boon and a path out of poverty.