John Thompson: The Danger of Ignoring the Most Important Problems Facing Our Kids and Our Society
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, shares his thoughts about what matters most. What matters most for the future is not test scores, yet we have spent an entire generation–now almost two generations of young people who have passed through our schools since 2000–focusing only on test scores. Will we pay a price? Will they?
As I left the computer to walk the dog, a thought provoking title jumped off the screen, “2019 NAEP Results Show There’s Something Wrong Going On.” Our neighborhood is gentrifying too much, but the park still offers a wonderful place for cross-generational, cross-cultural conversations about what is going right and wrong. Only our spoiled dogs complain when daily discussions last a long time when recounting the latest Trump assaults on our constitutional democracy.
In contrast to corporate school reformers, who claimed that schools could be the answer to inequities, when a dog walker shared a link about another path to progress, we knew there is no single, silver bullet. We loved the New York Times’ “Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy,” but we knew that the doggies, on their own, can’t teach us “to step outside of our narrowest selves.”
https://www.the74million.org/article/petrilli-2019-naep-results-show-theres-something-wrong-going-on-3-theories-about-what-might-be-happening-in-our-schools-and-beyond/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/opinion/dogs-democracy.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/opinion/dogs-democracy.html
The NAEP title also provoked contemplation on the school reform blinders which blocked out conversations about issues outside the school building. For two CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: The Danger of Ignoring the Most Important Problems Facing Our Kids and Our Society | Diane Ravitch's blog
