"Who else would title it?": Scripting Students to Death
While it may seem to be little more than semantics to argue about whether teachers are the most important factor in student learning or teachers are the most important in-school factor in student learning, there is now little room to debate that how teachers are being mandated to treat students is inexcusable.
The rise of "no excuses" assumptions and practices are creating charter and public schools that provide for"other people's children" a culture of shame, but we often fail to recognize as well that the last thirty years of accountability have created schooling as an endless series of scripts for children to follow.
Consider this scenario shared with me just yesterday by email from a teacher in an urban charter school:
Favorite student story of the day:
I assigned their first writing project today -- a personal literacy narrative because we just finished reading the narrative of Frederick Douglass (our class mantra is “literacy is liberating”). On my