Sol Stern: School Choice Isn't Enough

Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, a longtime school choice advocate, writes a long article in City Journal saying that school choice isn't the cure-all he once hoped, thinking now that strong pedagogy, curricula, and standards are more vital.

But the new reliance on markets hasn’t prevented special interests from hijacking the curriculum. One such interest is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project—led by Lucy Calkins, the doyenne of the whole-language reading approach, which postulates that all children can learn to read and write naturally, with just some guidance from teachers, and that direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse. Calkins’s enterprise has more than $10 million in Department of Education contracts to guide reading and writing instruction in most of the city’s elementary schools, even though no solid evidence supports her methodology. This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests—widely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessment—Gotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasn’t staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.