For three decades now, the course of action has been to accept the system as it stands and to push its schools and teachers to deliver ‘better performance’. Perhaps not surprisingly, that effort to get an inert system to do-better has not proved an outstanding success. The theory of action should instead be to turn public education into a self-improving system.
Lately, our nation’s strategy for improving our schools is mostly limited to “getting tough” with teachers. Blaming teachers for poor outcomes, we spend almost all of our energy trying to control teachers’ behavior and school operations. But what if all of this is exactly the opposite of what is needed? What if trusting teachers, and not controlling them, is the key to school success?
If you want to know more about Avalon (a school with collective teacher autonomy) without visiting in person, this is probably the best you could do. A compilation of stories, studies and other publications by people who have been there; the founders, current advisors, former students, and national researchers. Edited by EE Senior Fellow and Hamline University Education Professor Walter Enloe, Avalon Alumna Holly Marsh, and David Pugh from Golden Hill Alternative Learning Center.
One effect of the federal stimulus funding for K-12 has been to create an impression that schools are suffering today because of the economic downturn. This is true. But the downturn is not the sole reason for their financial pains... nor is it the principal reason.
Ron Wolk, founder of Education Week, draws on his three decades in school reform to make the case for a "new schools" strategy, focused on individualized instruction instead of an assembly line approach to learning.
Today's youth are more different from each other and from previous generations than at any time in history. The nation's still standardized model of learning isn't working for nearly half of them. Customizing learning opportunities will. And today's fast-changing technology platform already shows how effective on-line and computer-centric learning can be – and how it changes the role of educators in amazing ways.
Ted Kolderie's book expands the 'theory of action' for state policy leadership. It explains why governors' and legislatures' efforts to open a new-schools sector is imperative for public education, to enable it to do the job it has now been given to do.
In this book excerpt, Ronald J. Newell and Irving H. Buchen describe the collaborative culture and democratic-governance structure embodied in EdVisions Cooperative—a teacher professional partnership. They describe how the governance model works in practice, the critical success factors, and the perceptions of involved teachers.
In most occupations we consider, ‘professional’ people do have the opportunity to work with partners in single- or multi-specialty groups they collectively own. But not in education. For heaven’s sake, why not?
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