Is "Reform" Really About Selling Schools Junk?
What if all the hype over education reforminess is really an excuse to sell schools worthless techie junk?
In the spring of 2010, the School of One was implemented at IS 228, in Brooklyn. By Sept. 2010, it was added to two more middle schools, MS 131 in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and IS 339 in the Bronx. I visited the program in Chinatown and was not impressed; I saw chaos and many disengaged kids, as I described here. As Joel Rose said during my tour of the school, it is intended to substitute for smaller classes, since “no human being” can provide fully individualized instruction to a class of 25.As Gary Rubinstein first explained on his blog, in two of these schools it caused achievement to slip in math, according to the DOE’s Progress reports: slightly at IS 228, and drastically at IS 339.