With courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union
Over the weekend, The New York Times featured David Kirp’s op-ed (Who Needs Charters With Public Schools Like These?) about what is working in the Tulsa Union Public School System. In the article, Kirp and Tulsa Union explain what it will take for our state and our schools to flourish in the 21st century.
Kirp, a professor at UC Berkeley and senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, starts with a description of an elite high school student writing an algorithm for an iPad video game.
Just kidding! Actually, Kirp is watching a 7-year-old at a high-poverty Tulsa school with a large percentage of English language learners. The second-graders use multimedia technology to learn how an “algorithm is like a recipe.” They will eventually design the recipes that we will need to prosper in the global marketplace.
A couple of fifth-graders guided Kirp around their community school. He suggested Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos should take the same tour. Kirp writes that DeVos “dismisses public schools as too slow-moving and difficult to reform,” but Tulsa demonstrates the nimbleness (and I’d say common sense) necessary to reject instruction-driven, test-driven, competition-driven shortcuts that require schools to build an academic edifice before laying the prerequisite foundation that enables meaningfulWith courage and time, OKCPS could follow Tulsa Union - NonDoc:
