Dear Gary,
I’ve often heard teachers complain about the latest reform “fad.” It’s understandable insofar as veteran teachers have been around for many rounds of “reform,” only to see each and every one swept abashedly into a locked closet in the back of the class (right next to where I surreptitiously put those pre-tests I never got around to grading).
I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I suspect that you agree. Where we’d probably part ways is the takeaway from this insight. You might say that this goes to show how temporal the current regime of reform is; I would say that the faddish nature of past reform shows that we need to stay the course.
You write that Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson’s reforms in Washington DC have not worked. (Disclosure: I previously spent a couple months working as an intern at StudentsFirst. And I had one very…
StudentsFirst has raised tens of millions of dollars on the lie that they, alone, care about students who need to be defended from all the teachers who only care about themselves. The biggest distortion of their numbers is their claim that they have 1.3 million members. Many of these ‘members’ are people who are completely…
read more »On Letterman the other day, the top 10 category was: Top 10 reasons I’ve decided to become a teacher. Reading the reasons were ten brand new 2013 corps members. So of course it is pretty ironic that out of all the perspective teachers in the country who could have been chosen from various education programs,…
read more »Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools. Enough is enough.’ Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’ The premise of Harlem Children’s Zone is a good one. It serves to provide school and complete wrap-around services (health, mental health, nutrition, etc.)…
read more »Riding the Subway today I saw this poster about the Common Core tests. I won’t analyze it at length here. Just take a look at how far away the basket is from the kid. If he can’t make that shot, would it mean that his basketball coach is ‘ineffective’?
read more »When I was a kid, around ten years old I guess, my father told me a joke that began with the question “What are the three biggest lies?” I said I didn’t know and he proceeded to tell me that the first biggest lie is “The check is in the mail,” which as a ten…
read more »A few weeks ago, fellow TFA alum Matt Barnum invited me to a public ‘discussion’ about education reform. Though Matt seems to consider himself further to whatever direction ‘reformers’ are in the spectrum, I’m not so sure I’d place him there. Still, based on the massive number of comments (72, though a lot are from…
read more »I’ve written a bunch of posts about my visit to the KIPP high school in New York city over the past few months. The first was a general summary and, since then, I’ve gotten more deeply into some of the things I learned there. I thought the school was just OK. As we always hear…
read more »A few weeks ago I was invited by Matt Barnum to discuss various issues in education reform through a series of letters. Matt is a TFA alum who is now in law school. He has written several articles in various newspapers about the complexity of improving education. Most recently he wrote something about how it…
read more »So the first season of Blackboard Wars has ended and, as I expected, it reached the conclusion it was created to. Yes, ‘reform’ isn’t easy. The community resists radical change, even when it is what is best for it. The early ‘success’ of this school and its teachers validates the idea that all you need…
read more »By a somewhat frustrated 1991 alum
test
