What 'System' Works for Both of Us?
Today, Robert Pondiscio once again writes to Deborah Meier.
Dear Deborah,
Happy New Year to you as well, and ... wait a minute. Let me make sure I've got this right. Youlined up $50 million in philanthropic funding to support 150 schools and 50,000 students, and the whole thing went up in smoke at the mere whim of a new schools chancellor? That's not democracy, it's despotism!
You write that you've been "trying to imagine a 'system' that could work for the kind of liberty within the context of democracy that we both seek." Perhaps the best "system" is no system at all. My friend Andy Smarick wrote a book recently, The Urban School System of the Future, which argues that big city school systems have outlived their useful life and should be replaced. All schools in a city, he thinks, should be run by outside operators. A schools chancellor would be more portfolio manager than dictator. I find his argument persuasive. Based on your experience perhaps you do, too.
That said, I will always be more interested in what goes on inside schools than in governance issues and structural reform. In theory, ed reform should encourage a full flowering of innovative curriculum and pedagogies. In practice, however, we still have something close to an educational monoculture. Too many of my colleagues in the ed reform camp remain stubbornly
