Ed Reform Groundhog Day
During a conversation about education reform at a holiday party I attended last week, a long-time high school teacher said to me, “You’ll see as you get more years of experience. You start to feel like: haven’t we seen this already?”
I laughed and said it’s like that cliché you always hear about insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
When it comes to ed reform, of course, it’s really not a cliché. It’s par for the course.
Check out the quote below, and see if you can guess the year it was written:
…schools will offer a common core of learning and, at the same time, provide diversity and choice. In short, individualized education implies the personalization of the entire educational process.
If you guessed 1974, you were right.
This was written by Robert G. Scanlon, former Pennsylvania Education Secretary, in an article called: “A Curriculum for Personalized Education.”
Recently, with endorsements and investments from Mark Zuckerberg, the U.S. Department of Education, and members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, personalized learning has been heralded as the latest, greatest “innovation” to hit our reform-battered schools.
But a close look into the internet archives of educational history reveals that there is nothing innovative about this idea at all.
In “A Curriculum for Personalized Education,” Scanlon describes a curriculum that “permits student mastery of instructional content at individual learning rates,” “encourage[s] student evaluation of progress toward mastery,” and includes “a variety of paths for mastery of any given objective.”
Flash forward forty years to a portion of a documentpublished by the Gates Foundation titled “Proficiency-Based Pathways”:
“Learning solutions—units, courses, and subjects—should haveEd Reform Groundhog Day | Save Maine Schools: