The Urgency for Change
I feel like I should do some fun tool blogging or great classroom blogging or something before heading down the depressing road of writing more about change in schools, but I guess I can’t help myself. Especially after taking pictures like the one at right at a school I visited a couple of weeks ago and after reading quotes like this one:
“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.”
That’s Stan Karp of the New Jersey Education Law Center lamenting the cuts and “reforms” here in my great state and elsewhere in a blog post in the Washington Post. (If you want to see a video of Karp giving basically the same riff on the topic, check out his YouTube video and there is atranscript here.) It’s a really powerful exploration of the current conversation around change and the many problems surrounding it.
The critical point to me, however, is this: all of this orchestrated bashing of teachers and schools is opening the door for folks outside of education to come in and “save the day” Superman style, a fact that, as Karp suggests, could undermine the whole
