School Reform 252 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 0 1 Complexities of School Reform Walter Feinberg University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign Consider the following: as concerns about schooling move from the local to the national level, there is increasing demand for standardized definitions and measure- ments. Without such standards we cannot assess the comparative performance of children in, say, New York and Alabama. Yet there are costs to this meeting this demand. Let us assume, for example, that Johnny enters the first grade underweight and hungry, with poor eyesight, with no friends, with unemployed parents, and with reading scores considerably below grade level. Suppose at the end of the year, he has a had a good school breakfast and lunch every day, has had his eyes checked in school and now wears corrective eye glasses, has made ten good friends, plays in an after school play group, and takes an important role in his class play. Yet assume that he still has unemployed parents and below grade level reading scores. On a local level where neighbors and other teachers and parents know some- thing about Johnny’s situation, all of the improvements would count in assessing the success of Johnny’s school. On the national level, however, these other matters are often washed out of the evaluation as too idiosyncratic. The school’s success must be evaluated solely on terms of Johnny’s reading scores. As this measure becomes more prominent, and begins to determine the flow of dollars to schools, the after school play group and the class play are cut out, and recess is shortened by ten minutes to provide more time for reading. Since drill seems to be the best method for increasing scores, the trip to the school library is cancelled and drill sessions put in its place. Other ramifications of reform are not necessarily as visible. Because national issues require standardized measures (of educational success), some disciplinary models are favored over others. Economics, and psychometrics with their simple and clear measures of success and failure, will be preferred over more locally focused disciplines such as anthropology or ethnography. And this in turn reinforces the narrow definition of success as reading-output as the more contextual insights of other disciplines are muted. The above is offered by way of illustrating the caution that Megan Jessiman tells us is needed when considering the merits of school reform. No matter what we think of the merits of contemporary schooling, or of specific proposals for reform, it is a caution that needs to be taken very seriously. Her essay reminds us that schooling is a complex practice, and that if we focus like a laser on one area of change, we may be in great danger of neglecting other areas that are important for schools to serve. As I read the essay it is not an anti-reform message. Rather it is an intelligent reform message. In her essay Jessiman connects these cautionary concerns to the deeper ideas of Ernst Cassirer, whose work has dropped off of the intellectual horizon since the 1960s. She believes that if we apply his ideas to schooling, we will become sensitized