Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools

Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools:

Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools

Education reformers love the concept of "creative disruption." Applying a business model to public education, they argue that the way to improve schools is through disrupting the system by closing under-performing schools, firing under-performing teachers and introducing competition for students in the form of charter schools and school vouchers. Only by disrupting the system and exposing it to market forces can we hope to improve teaching and learning, or so the reformer narrative goes.

Let's set aside for a moment that all this "creative disruption" ignores the root cause for the struggles of public education - poverty. Leave aside also that the only way reformers seem to be able to identify "failing schools" and "failing teachers" is through standardized tests. Let's focus on the fatal flaw in the concept of "creative disruption." That fatal flaw is that disruption does not further student learning, indeed it interferes with learning on every level. Turmoil is anathema to learning. The turmoil created by closing public schools, high staff turnover (read TFA recruits), the opening and closing of charter schools will all only exacerbate the learning challenges of urban children.

What we need is not creative disruption, but creative stability. Creative stability would focus on providing children with an adequately financed, well-resourced, professionally-staffed, local neighborhood school.

Every teacher knows that children learn best in a stable environment. That is why teachers spend the first several days of school establishing routines and norms for the smooth functioning of the classroom. I like to think of it as setting the children up for success. Children are learning machines. The first job of the teacher then, is to establish rituals in the classroom that help the children get out of their own way to learn.

Literacy educator Lucy Calkins at Columbia Teachers College put it this way:

 I have finally realized that the most creative environments in our society are not the kaleidoscopic environments in which everything is always changing and Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools: