I was going to share my thoughts on this Washington Post article where urban superintendents and others share their thinking on how to fix broken schools. The article is titled, How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders. I changed my mind, however, when I read this post by John Sener at Educational Technology Center, etc. He does a much better job than I could.
I am not suggesting that you read the manifesto, but I do encourage you to read the Sener post. I believe that what he has to say will resonate well with many of you. His basic premise is that schools do not need fixing and that they are not broken because they have never essentially worked for all students. I know this from my own school experience and from my observations over many years. If they are simply broken we should be able to go back and identify what caused the break and "fix" it. Unfortunately, the fix will require adaptive changes because as Sener suggests, they never did work for all students.
I find myself agreeing with most of what he says, but I'm struggling with his argument that we do not know how to educate all children.
But the really massive error being made here is the notion that we already know how to educate everyone, and we just need to remove the remaining obstacles like “poorly performing” teachers. We have raised our expectations to reach every child through education, but we haven’t yet figured out how to meet them. It is a noble, historic, risky, and ultimately awesome enterprise to undertake, but it is badly undermined by pretending that we know how to do this, or ever did.
I believe that we know much about what needs to be done to support each student's achievement and that our focus on key content, active learning, and checking for understanding is a good start; one that research suggests does have an impact on learning. Yes, I understand that we also have obstacles to overcome and learning that must take place to achieve this worthy and necessary goal of academic success for all students. I'm energized by the challenge and eager to engage in the work with the adults in our school system.
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The Steven G Brant article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant/waiting-for-superman-and_b_756804.html) is worth reading. While acknowledging that they have a story to tell, he suggests that the producers of Waiting for Superman have an incomplete solution and that the answer lies in systems thinking and design.
He says, "Waiting For "Superman" ends by saying "The system is broken." ...what it should really say is "The system is both broken and obsolete. It needs to be redesigned so it will produce creative, collaborative problem solvers, not just fixed as if the fundamental design is perfectly okay."
The language sounds remarkably similar to that of our Tahoma Outcomes. Fixing the broken parts of the system will not lead to better schools if the system itself has changed. But if we know what needs to be done, how do we convince others it is the solution and how do we go about doing it? These are the essential questions; however, we first must view the problem through a systems lense.
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