To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

TO REDESIGN OUR SCHOOLS, POST-PANDEMIC, WE NEED TO REMOVE SOME SACRED COWS

Watch this video. What do you see?

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Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute.

We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:

Grades. Bells. Schedules. Credit Hours. Classrooms. Tests. Transcripts. Homework. 180 days. Age-based cohorts.

And the list could go on.

For this reason, we produced a short film series that looks at a few of these structures, and how and why they need to change. Here’s one of them: CONTINUE READING: To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Education Reinventers

For the past ten years public education has been under assault by the self-proclaimed education ‘reformers.’ Strong personalities like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Corey Booker, and others led the movement that gave us Race To The Top, Race To The Top waivers, and the Every Child Succeeds Act.

They got a chance to experiment with their ideas subjecting kids and neighborhoods around the country to school closures, charter schools, and state test madness. After a few years they declared that their experiments were working, they pointed to a few schools that seemingly proved that if you replace unionized teachers who are not scared of being fired with non-unionized teachers who are scared of being fired, you will close the achievement gap measured by standardized test scores. But the successes were mostly false — charter schools were shedding 75% of their students in order to get a so-called 100% college acceptance rate. Other schools were practicing abusive discipline practices that forced out many of the most difficult to teach students. There was even a fiasco called the Tennessee Achievement School District which promised to take over schools in the bottom 5% and move them to the top 25% within five years. Ten years later exactly none of the schools made it out of the bottom 10%.

Reformers needed to change their PR strategy. They replaced Michelle Rhee with CONTINUE READING: Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog