Tough Love for Schools: Essays on Competition, Accountability, and Excellence

In Tough Love for Schools , Frederick M Hess calls for policymakers, educators, and citizens to get serious about doing what is needed to refashion American education for the twenty-first century. Taking a tough look at both public schooling and several popular reforms, he explains why pinched definitions of public schooling are unhelpful and offers principles for reform that will create schools that are receptive to initiative, entrepreneurship, and excellence. Hess embraces accountability, competition, and new flexibility but explains how many champions of reforms like accountability and school choice duck hard truths, embrace problematic policies, and undermine their own proposals. Among other topics, Hess proposes new principles by which to define public education in the twenty-first century, calls for largely eliminating the licensure of teachers and administrators, critiques conservative efforts to enlist the civil rights community in the quest for school vouchers, considers why accountability systems often fail and what is needed to make them succeed, and explains why school choice does not produce educational competition but how it can. Hess is known for his work on a diverse range of educational issues. His ideas have been touted by the secretary of education and presented at the White House. This volume will be sure to influence the public debate about education policy.