Guest contributor Tim McClung describes some of the lively discussions in West Virginia this year about student motivation, the profession of teaching, school equity, communities—and ideas and proposals from task forces, workshops, conferences and legislative committees. Most of the fascinating and remarkably different ideas have come from students and younger parents and teachers. But at the end of the day, urgency is not called for.
By their early teens many young people today are already living quite adult lives—in the home, on the street—looking not only after themselves but often siblings, neighbors, and their parents. The Cristo Rey model of schools works for inner-city youth, in part, because they treat them as adults and give them real, adult responsibilities.
There has been a lot of coverage and argument of Abby Sunderland’s attempted voyage around the world in a sailboat. The core question of this situation seems not to be whether or not a teenager should be allowed (by her parents, by society) to sail a dangerous voyage - but instead whether she qualifies as a competent adult.
Guest contributor Paul Hill of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) describes how big city school districts are pulling together many of the best ideas in education reform—small schools, chartering, more spending at the school level and less in the central office, performance-based accountability, continuous improvement and family choice—into a coherent package called a portfolio strategy.
To resolve budget deficits schools and political leaders are arguing over whether they should spend more, or cut. Most likely both will happen. While necessary for the short term, these are not long-term strategies. Pressures on budgets will continue, and there have got to be different choices.
In June of last year teachers, union and district officials, policy makers and researchers came together at a national meeting to discuss the growth of innovation zones inside school districts.
Education|Evolving’s new strategy paper Innovation-based Systemic Reform urges policy makers, in revising ESEA, to think of strategy as a ‘split screen.’ The only realistic approach is to pursue our differing goals at the same time.
Video interviews with Dan French and Lynn Nordgren, who during an Education|Evolving meeting last June expressed their support for moving control over school form and function out to the front-line units, including teachers.
The consensus in education reform is to build on traditional school. Even Microsoft, in a “We See” ad for software, shows a classroom, a blackboard – and no computer.
