We’re About To Hear Many Suggestions About How To Reshape Education. Here’s How To Sort Them Out.
The vast majority of the nation’s schools have pressed pause due to the current pandemic. In many areas they will stumble through the remainder of a year that will little resemble an ordinary year. This is already prompting many folks to declare this a golden opportunity to reconsider some of the traditional features of U.S. schooling.
If we’ve got to have school without grades, without desks and rooms, without set hours for meeting anyway, why not consider how to play with these features to create better school systems? Lots of folks have thoughts. Some of the ideas that emerge will be useful and worthwhile, some will be opportunistic profiteering, and some will be baloney.
Here are some clues to sorting the educational wheat from the opportunistic chaff.
Who is pitching the idea?
Teachers know the system better than anyone; they are, in fact, the leading experts on public education in this country. Most teachers have spent their entire career thinking and talking about how to make the system better serve students. They’ve already started talking about how this crisis could present opportunities (here’s one such conversation in action).
When you’re considering a hot new idea for education, consider the source. Look the pitcher up—do they have any educational training or experience at all. Note: if they spent two years in a classroom before starting their career as an educational entrepreneur or thought leader, that doesn’t count. And if their bold idea just happens to involve a program produced by a company they run or invest in, well, that doesn’t necessarily mean their idea is a bad one, but it certainly is reason to examine the goods carefully.
Has the idea been field tested?
Is there any evidence that this bold new idea might CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: We’re About To Hear Many Suggestions About How To Reshape Education. Here’s How To Sort Them Out.