Cracking the Code of Education Reform: Creative Compliance and Ethical Leadership

Programs and policies that can hurt students and learning abound. School accountability plans, educator evaluation programs, standardization of curriculum and assessment, contradictory policy-maker expectations, and influences from international testing programs are just some of the current issues that exert pressure on public school leaders via rhetoric and education reform policy proposals. School leaders need to be able to make accurate judgments about the ethics and efficacy of education reforms so they can decide whether they must defend students and educators from practices and policies built on nothing more than rhetoric, junk-science, and anti-intellectual ideology, or whether they should support a proposal or program founded on evidence of positive outcomes.