LAUSD’s New Budget Unveils The “Sophie’s Choice” of Education Reform: How School Choice Is Pushed
When we grew our school system from one conducted by itinerant, very young generalists to that of a modern, publicly funded collection of certificated and professional specialists, we developed a system intended to be integrated at the “student-level”. That is, in attending specialized classes, these separate classes would all become blended inside of any given student. And any given student would be “composed” of exposure to a certain constellation of specialty subjects. In the meantime we determined what a core group of those specialty subjects looked like and acknowledged that there is a difference, in some sense, between certain “kinds” of classes.
Thus we had a High School in which there were an array of classes to be chosen and from which certain core courses needed to be taken by all – math, for example, to a certain level, and English Language Arts (ELA). There were “academic” classes and “physical education” classes and “performing arts” classes of, say, choir or chamber music or orchestra or theatrical production or drawing or painting. There were vocational classes intended to be learned from a master as an apprentice and utilizing physical skills rather than academic knowledge like, say, a foreign language. Instead these classes taught how to do some thing, in contrast with accreting the building blocks of understanding that would be used toward investigating some existential or academic life’s truth, say, ‘The Meaning Of Love’ or ‘how cancer develops’.
So all that knowledge gets integrated inside of the student, collected from a series of individual classes. And when these are absent, or diminished in quality, then the ability to integrate a full set of experiences and information is jeopardized. Here, parenthetically, is an interesting challenge to the wisdom of this protocol at least in earlier grades.
In practice, because the current paradigm relies on a large collection of disarticulated classes integrated elsewhere (inside the student), it is possible for the system to glide for a good while with an increasingly fewer set of constituent components without seeing a breakdown of the general setup.
And yet at some point, the fiction can no longer be sustained that a complex LAUSD’s New Budget Unveils The “Sophie’s Choice” of Education Reform: How School Choice Is Pushed – redqueeninla: