No Mystery Behind Improbable Scholars
JULY 10, 2013
If we could just fire the bad teachers…
If we had quality teacher evaluations…
If we had vouchers, charter schools, competition…
If we had common, world-class standards… a laptop or tablet for every student… smaller classes… a sharp reduction in poverty…
If you’ve been around education for a while, or if you follow education policy and education reform debates, you know plenty of these potential super-fixes, game changers, the “cage-busting” ideas that supposedly hold the key to transforming schools. Dig a little deeper, and I don’t think most serious thinkers would claim that there are any silver bullets, but still, the intensity around the debates show how firmly we believe in certain tenets of our educational philosophy.
What if we could channel that intensity in a more productive direction, away from speaking and writing and blogging and tweeting, and into some productive work? What if the solutions to our problems are simpler than we think and we just need to roll up our sleeves to implement some basic, common sense