John Thompson: An Improbable Tale of Successful Reform
Guest post by John Thompson.
David Kirp begins his new book, Improbable Scholars, with the sentence, "Educators have grown wearily accustomed to being slapped around." School "reformers" have lambasted public schools as "fossilized bureaucracies run by paper-pushers and filled with time-serving teachers preoccupied with their own job security, not the lives of their students." The elites have promoted films with the message that charter schools are the answer, even though they are no more effective than traditional public schools. Kirp describes charters as a "kinder gentler face of privatization." "These privately run academies" have become the "playthings of the super-rich."
Kirp then dissects the dramatic turnaround of the entire school system of Union City, New Jersey, and he shows how we can build great schools on the strengths of our democratic culture. Its answer did not come from technocrats from the outside, but from a local culture of "abrazos" or caring. Rather than firing our way to the top, Kirp shows that school improvement must come from trusting relationships. The secret sauce of Union City's success is "respeto," or respect.
Union City's transformation was made possible by an activist New Jersey Supreme Court that ordered the state
David Kirp begins his new book, Improbable Scholars, with the sentence, "Educators have grown wearily accustomed to being slapped around." School "reformers" have lambasted public schools as "fossilized bureaucracies run by paper-pushers and filled with time-serving teachers preoccupied with their own job security, not the lives of their students." The elites have promoted films with the message that charter schools are the answer, even though they are no more effective than traditional public schools. Kirp describes charters as a "kinder gentler face of privatization." "These privately run academies" have become the "playthings of the super-rich."
Kirp then dissects the dramatic turnaround of the entire school system of Union City, New Jersey, and he shows how we can build great schools on the strengths of our democratic culture. Its answer did not come from technocrats from the outside, but from a local culture of "abrazos" or caring. Rather than firing our way to the top, Kirp shows that school improvement must come from trusting relationships. The secret sauce of Union City's success is "respeto," or respect.
Union City's transformation was made possible by an activist New Jersey Supreme Court that ordered the state
