Teaching in Turnaround Schools: Second Time Around
As I approach the second anniversary of my blog, I will be returning to particular posts in the past 24 months that hit themes I believe are important in reform and classroom practice. In presenting the post again, I will update facts in an introduction to the post and then make a few comments.
This post originally appeared August 11, 2009. Rafe Esquith continues to teach, Sarah Fine is no longer teaching. The questions I ask here are ones that I have mentioned numerous times over the past two years as crucial for anyone who makes, adopts, and implements policy–that means school boards, superintendents, legislators, principals, and teachers–to answer.
Lots of stories from principals, parents, and students reveal practices that range from marvelous to malign. Individual teachers give us a sense of what happens in their classrooms. Rafe Esquith in LA writes about his lessons and his kids’ experiences in an elementary school; Sarah Fine, an English teacher in a D.C. charter school, tells of her successes and failures. But beyond stories and first-hand accounts, helpful as they are in
