10 Ways School Reformers Get It Wrong

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/10-ways-school-reformers-get-it-wrong



***SNIP

1. The school system as a whole is not a failure. For the children in the top 60% of the economic spectrum, schools serve pretty well to promote learning and educational mobility and achievement. The fact is, school failure is not high in suburban and middle-class neighborhoods. Schools have traditionally succeeded for middle-class students and families actively aspiring to climb the class ladder. In these families, learning readiness has been established in a culture that supports success and academic risk taking. Schools do well in partnership with this middle-class family culture.

***SNIP


2. In the ways schools do fail, it is the same as it has been for 100 years. There is at the same time as traditional success, massive school failure and it’s historic. Schools have never succeeded with children from very low-income families. The failure rates we record in our schools, both now and in the past, are primarily the result of the failures sustained by the poor and the near-poor.


***SNIP

3. Teachers are not the cause of the problem. In the context of persistent failure in poor communities, clearly teachers are not the cause of failure, nor is the school curriculum. We never blamed teachers in the past for the same levels of failure. Neither breaking the teacher’s union nor ultra-sonic testing nor privately purchased, online lessons will solve the problem that is both present in the failure of poor kids in schools and reflected by it; namely the dunghill of poverty that far too many kids are forced to grow up in.

***SNIP

4. School failure once matched economic needs. There was a time of course when academic failure in school matched economic needs. Jobs were available throughout the production system, both helping to generate national wealth and serving those who enjoyed it. It could even be thought that if more kids succeeded in school, the socioeconomic system as it was operating would not have been well-served. Structural conditions of school achievement match the structural race and class parameters of the larger society. Indeed, not until after World War II did schools identify cognitively based skills as the core of their mission. The major curricular purposes served included retaining labor long enough, teaching discipline—so much so that school critics often saw the school regimen as factory-like – and Americanizing immigrants. Not until the 1960s movement toward social welfare programs did the goal of high level school achievement even begin to include African American children. And for children of Italian and Irish origin, work opportunity was only just beginning to have a relationship to school success.

[KG]

1. there's a sea of change going on in society that school adminstrators seem to want to ignore;

it's so much easier to blame problems on teachers.