Urban School Reform: Beyond Stars and Scandals
This week, we're revisiting some of the top sessions from EWA's 66th National Seminar held at Stanford University. We asked journalists who attended to contribute posts, and today's guest blogger is Kyla Calvert of San Diego Public Radio. Stream any session from National Seminar in your browser, or subscribe via RSS or iTunes. For more on school leadership, visit EWA's Story Starters online resource.
Reporters are often missing the story of what reform efforts mean for students, contends author Richard Lee Colvin. In his book “Tilting at Windmills: School Reform, San Diego, and America’s Race to Renew Public Education”, Colvin looks at the seven-year tenure of Alan Bersin as San Diego Unified’s superintendent and the sweeping reforms he implemented while on the job. In his EWA National Seminar presentation, he panned the media’s coverage as stopping at the “he said, she said” controversy and never asking the question of whether the reforms benefit the city’s students.
Colvin argued that in covering the controversy over how San Diego’s schools should be run, reporters missed out on the actual reforms that Bersin put in place. These reforms, including increased after-school tutoring time and long blocks of reading instruction, did get attention from researchers, including UC San Diego’s Julian Betts and Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. Both have come down on the side of saying the changes benefited students, especially in the district’s elementary schools.
David Kirp’s “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System
Reporters are often missing the story of what reform efforts mean for students, contends author Richard Lee Colvin. In his book “Tilting at Windmills: School Reform, San Diego, and America’s Race to Renew Public Education”, Colvin looks at the seven-year tenure of Alan Bersin as San Diego Unified’s superintendent and the sweeping reforms he implemented while on the job. In his EWA National Seminar presentation, he panned the media’s coverage as stopping at the “he said, she said” controversy and never asking the question of whether the reforms benefit the city’s students.
Colvin argued that in covering the controversy over how San Diego’s schools should be run, reporters missed out on the actual reforms that Bersin put in place. These reforms, including increased after-school tutoring time and long blocks of reading instruction, did get attention from researchers, including UC San Diego’s Julian Betts and Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. Both have come down on the side of saying the changes benefited students, especially in the district’s elementary schools.
David Kirp’s “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System