Thursday, August 23, 2012

Because Nothing Has Changed In Schools in the Past 10 Years

Russo's post today about applying arguments toward standardization in medicine to education makes him sound like he needs to get into schools more. Regular urban schools in particular.

Just yesterday my wife encountered a hubbub about one of the courses she had been assigned to teach this year. Despite the course number surviving the last great course purge in the PPSD, anxious messages were tumbling down from above about the lack of a "guaranteed and viable curriculum" for the course, an urgent need for a textbook, any textbook! Not to mention a syllabus! Of course, all these things were resolved without consulting the person who would teach the class, who was also probably the only person in the conversation that had experience previously teaching the course in the district.

So anyway, professional autonomy giving way to standardization is not something that might happen in the future in education, and you can judge its efficacy for yourself by looking at the test scores of any urban district managed by a Broad Academy graduate.

How's it working?

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