How Our Schools Could Be.
1995; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 76; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Education Studies and Reforms
ResumoAlthough the reasons for the current national concern about schooling may have little to do with democracy, the reforms described here by Ms. Meier have everything to do with it. WE STAND poised between two alternative visions of the schools of tomorrow. The tough part is that these two visions are often espoused by the same people, and teachers and citizens alike are led to believe that both can be carded out simultaneously. In fact, they stand in chilling contrast to each other. One vision rests on the assumption that top-down support for bottom-up change -- which everyone is rhetorically for -- means that the top does the critical intellectual work, defining purposes and content as well as how to measure them, and the bottom does the nuts and bolts, the how-to -- a sort of men's versus women's division of labor. The second vision rests on a different assumption -- that the only top-down reforms that are useful are those that help to create and sustain self-governing learning communities. When schools see themselves as membership communities, not service organizations, parents and teachers discuss ideas, argue about purposes, and exercise judgment, because taking responsibility for making important decisions is at the heart of what it means to be well-educated. Students can't learn unless the adults who must show them the way practice what they preach. The Goals 2000 national education agenda, with its focus on setting measurable goals and standards, is weighted down with assumptions that the top does the critical intellectual work and the bottom is left with doing the how-to. But that second camp, with its alternative assumptions of what schools could be, is showing a surprising capacity to thrive these days. At least for a time. I've been told that I'm ignoring the train that's already left the station and is coming down the line, the do-it-or-else express. But if history is any guide, such fast-track solutions often turn out to be expensive dead ends. Can we post a counter-mandate to the students will dicta being invented by expert, university-based task forces? Let me propose a mandate saying, Standards shall be phased in only as fast as the school, the district, and the state can bring their adult staff members up to the standards they expect of all 18-year-old students. That might delay the train just a little. We in New York have historically lived under the imposition of an awesome array of local and state curricular mandates and outcomes assessments. (Except for private schools, which were always free to ignore them and always have.) Every so often someone gets the idea to create still another set, generally laid right on top of the old ones, and then moves on to things. New York teachers are experienced and inventive saboteurs of the best and worst of such plans. Our state is home therefore to some of the greatest as well as some of the worst of schools. But the second alternative described above is staring us in the face. And it is gathering surprising national momentum, even from such unexpected (for old cynics like me) places as the New York State Board of Regents (New York's state board of education). The state authorities are now embarked on a new and more promising approach, as are the governor, the mayor, and the local New York City board of education -- despite contradictions all over the place. That so many are now marching to a different drummer in the name of a different vision of systemic reform is heartening. This different vision has the support this time around not only of child-centered romantics like me, but also of hardheaded corporate and management reformers, such as the folks who invented the team approach to building the Saturn car or the Deming way of managing businesses. We also have some hardheaded history of school reform to point to, on a scale that should make it hard to dismiss this other way as suitable only for the brave and the foolish, the maverick and the exceptional. …
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