Why School Reform Advocates Aren’t So Businesslike After All
In her book Curriculum Mapping, education consultant Kathy Glass invokes Peter Drucker—and his deep knowledge of the corporate world—to help explain why schoolteachers need quantifiable goals and standards.
“Drucker . . . states in his book The Practice of Management, ‘Setting objectives enables a business to get where it should be going rather than be the plaything of weather, winds and accidents,’” Glass writes. “In teaching,” she adds, “standards help to set objectives as they provide teachers with a target to shoot for and allow for measurement. One cannot manage or teach effectively what one does not measure.”
On some level, this is undoubtedly true, which is why I’ve previously advocated more accountability in K-12 education through the use of performance measures. But what if most schools, in a bid to be more businesslike, are measuring things in a very different way than Drucker would prescribe?
I’ve become convinced that this is precisely what’s happening—with harmful consequences for teachers and students alike—since I’ve started reading a remarkable blog called Gatsby in L.A.
Written by my close friend Ellie Herman, the blog chronicles her yearlong journey into a series of Los Angeles area classrooms, as she endeavors to discover what makes a great teacher. (The name is a nod to the fact that most students read The Great Gatsby in 11th grade English, where Herman is hanging out.)
Herman, who in a past life was a successful television writer and then spent five years teaching drama, creative writing and English at a charter high school in South L.A., intentionally seeks out exemplary educators in all sorts of settings—schools with very poor kids, rich kids and those in between. And in every case, the educators she
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