– Andy Hargeaves, a proponent of Finnish public education methods and arguably one of Canada’s leading education commentators, succinctly sums up what has been happening in the U.S. and Canada in school reform.

“Following the lead of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and before them, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, [the school reform movement] set about centralizing more of the curriculum and introducing more testing to hold teachers accountable,” Dr. Hargreaves wrote in an e-mail.

“It provided a new generation of consumer-oriented parents with information about the performance of schools, and published rankings of schools to stimulate market competition between them. Instead of measuring what we value, we have got stuck in valuing what we can easily measure.”