10 Ways School Reformers Get It Wrong
Colin Greer,
AlterNet,
Aug 08, 2012
This was a primer article for our online panel today. It begins by getting straight to the heart of school failure, which is that schools are not the cause of the failure, social inequality is the cause. "Most efforts to reform school governance, create alternatives or bemoan teachers don't address the real problem, which is poverty." This was once what society (believed it) needed: an underclass of less-well educated people to perform menial tasks. Now, if social leaders want to actually improve learning (and it's a big 'if') then standardized testing isn't the right tool. In the 70s things like adaptive testing, social expectations, service learning and smaller classes were all found to be important. "If we think about the education of privileged kids we can recognize quickly that a small adult-student ratio is a central anchor and face-to-face individual attention is highly prized." Privatization won't produce this result; rather, understanding that education is something that takes place in society as a whole is essential to understanding learning
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