Thursday, March 12, 2009

Inconsistency Illustrated, II

You don't have to be Sherman Dorn to pick up on inconsistent arguments about school reform. Unfortunately I was not in the room yesterday to see a high school student explain to a district administrator in front of a faculty meeting that it was contradictory to argue that it is important for schools have to have the same schedule to prevent disruption to students if they transfer, yet it would not be disruptive to students to change the school's schedule next year. But I heard about it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great, Great, Great comment.

Ask a "reformer" about "best practices" and typically they will advocate tight curriculum alignment and curriculum pacing (which not coincidently is a tool for controling labor in a data-driven process)

Ask a highly mobile student what he was studying in his course in the previous school and how often to you get an asnwer other than, "I don't remember." Often the reason is the skin deep instruction incentivized by NCLB, but often the student can't remember when they were last in school.

Students know the facts. Too many "reformers" don't know and don't care to learn about real-world realities.