Talented urban teacher says new national education laws won’t work
John Thompson’s teaching methods wouldn’t work for everyone.
One day in a hallway at Marshall High School in Oklahoma City, he grabbed a student with a criminal record whom he had taught at a summer camp, pushed him against a wall and told him to go pee in a cup. This got the laugh from the boy and his friends that Thompson had anticipated, since they knew of the unusual teacher-student bond and saw the joke.
Such were the advantages of getting to know students well, accepting their problems and backgrounds and finding ways they could succeed and perhaps even enjoy school.
Thompson spends much of his riveting, revealing book — “A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids” — illustrating why the current educational fashion of focusing on such students’ weaknesses doesn’t work, and why the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act being negotiatedby Congress is unlikely to be any better than the No Child Left Behind law it will replace.
Thompson witnessed at his urban school “this accountability-driven reform . . . imposed, unfortunately, by advocates of disruptive change who typically had little knowledge of high-poverty K-12 schools,” he said. “Inner city schools need more disruption like we need another gang war.”
It doesn’t matter which bright-eyed bureaucrats and consultants are setting policy, Thompson said. The next federal education law’s effort to give state governments more control over public schools will not help. For four Talented urban teacher says new national education laws won’t work - The Washington Post:
" A Teacher's Tale is a case study of national and local significance. It explains how test-driven school reform turned John Thompson's run-of-the-mill inner-city school into the type of brutal urban school that defies improvement. "
