Alfie Kohn himself is a giant in the spheres of education policy and reform. For non-educators who don't know Kohn, check out the rest of his homepage; the link goes there.
The loss of Ted Sizer and Jerry Bracey leaves gaping wounds in the community of those who work for positive, authentic education reform. While there's been a little attention in the ed forum, part of what I grieve is that the best we've got go unrecognized and/or unappreciated beyond the community of non-corporate ed reformers. So I bring these giants to you, and ask for a moment of appreciation for their work, and their lives.
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Ted was a big-picture school reformer, with a keen sense of how structural changes ought to be made – major changes, at that; he exhibited a polite but persistent impatience with incrementalism – but he was nothing like the camera-ready school reformers whose call to arms is based on corporate abstractions. He never forgot that the goal isn’t Tougher Standards or Accountability. It’s to help kids engage in “serious thought, respectful skepticism, and curiosity about much of what lies beyond their immediate lives.” He and Debbie Meier hatched the Coalition of Essential Schools to create real standards-based reform, not to promulgate standards that are lists of “things that will be covered . . . put into the head of the student.” He wasn’t interested in “delivering instruction,” a metaphor employed unself-consciously by the kind of people whose idea of school improvement, he once said, involves “testing the kids until they begged for mercy.”<snip>
But he knew these deficiencies weren’t randomly distributed. “Tell me the incomes of your students’ families,” he wrote, “and I’ll describe to you your school.” He grasped the macro -- how hard it is to change a school so it stays changed – but also the micro, such as how teaching honors-track seniors in the fall (when all they can think about is college) is very different from teaching them in the spring (when their goal is “to have a party and, if white, to get a tan”).
If we lived in a country where a real thinker like Ted Sizer, rather than clueless managerial types and cliché-spouting politicians, got to be the Secretary of Education, maybe we wouldn’t need his wisdom so badly.
Nor would we need Jerry Bracey’s compulsive, perpetually irritated truth-telling. Where Ted charmed even his ideological opponents, Jerry pissed off even some of his allies. In what was apparently the last missive he banged out before going to sleep for the last time, a response to a newspaper article about “value-added” assessment techniques, he began as follows: “I can’t believe that this piece of crap appeared in the L.A. Times.” This he wrote to people who worked at the L.A. Times.
But then he went on to show exactly why it was crap and cited the National Research Council (with a link attached to the appropriate report). When he knew exactly what the data showed on a subject, which was often, he was impatient with people who didn’t. He was even less forgiving of people who wrote about the subject as if they knew what they were talking about when that obviously wasn’t true. Worst of all were those politicians, researchers, and journalists who deliberately distorted the data. Those people he skewered without mercy or tact.More:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/phpnews_1-3-0/news.php?action=mainnews&id=3
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