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For months now, Washington think tank dwellers have been casting supporters of the Broader Bolder Approach to Education as characters in a morality play about the future of school reform. The storyline goes like this: BBA supporters, who link student achievement to influences both inside and outside of schools, are slothful defenders of the status quo. Struggling against them are righteous warriors for school reform.

As we've noted before, this is a bogus story. No one benefits from this phony battle between school improvement and out-of-school supports for student success.  Students need excellent schools, but they also need excellent pre-K and after-school programs, health care programs, and other out-of-school supports for learning. ...

Last night, public television stations nationwide aired a one-hour documentary, Where We Stand, which evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. public education system.  While the noise of our current financial crash is drowning out news of the documentary, I do hope it will fuel robust conversations about public education.

The documentary's story line is already familiar to the education policy crowd:  The world is changing; our children will have to compete for jobs with their peers in Helsinki or Hong Kong; we're being creamed in international assessments of student performance; and our nation's prosperity depends in part on the fate of our schools.  Yet we have ample evidence that this message has not necessarily penetrated the public consciousness.  While just about everyone supports high academic standards in the abstract, students and their families alike often balk at ambitious coursework in, say, advanced mathematics or science. ...

In a story that has received remarkably little media attention so far, eight urban public schools in Connecticut are participating in an experiment to give teachers, parents and communities greater autonomy over curriculum, governance and budgets.  The Connecticut Alliance for CommPACT Schools is helping these formerly struggling schools reorganize.

Among the hallmarks of this effort: ...

Last week, the Chicago Sun Times ran a series of editorials advocating social and emotional learning in Chicago Public Schools.  According to the Sun Times, troubled schools whose students regularly face the consequences of violence and neglect confront sobering odds in raising those students' academic performance.  The writers call for a social and emotional learning curriculum in all schools, as well as for more social workers, school counselors and psychologists. 

Like the signers of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, they recognize the importance of stressing "social development and non-academic skills" alongside academic learning.  And like the Broader, Bolder Approach signers, they will likely be accused of abandoning academic rigor for some fuzzy-headed notion of "life skills." ...