"We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
"We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1)
On the first day of a graduate seminar at Stanford University that I taught a few years ago, I asked each of the 20 students to give a two-minute self-introduction detailing their name, what they did prior to graduate school, and why they enrolled in “Good Schools”: Research, Policy, and Practice.” After they introduced themselves, I, too, took the time to say that I had been a former high school teacher and superintendent for over two decades.
In listening to the students I reckoned that about one-third of the students had been teachers (many alums of Teach for America), about a third worked as consultants and policy analysts for education non-profits and had no direct experience in schools (save for their years as students). The remaining students came from backgrounds in business, science, and the arts.
I listened to each student as they told of their classroom experiences as student or teacher or their strong impulse to give the next generation of children and youth a better schooling than they had received. Many expressed a fervent wish to turn failing schools, particularly in urban districts, into successful ones. They wanted to reduce the inequities they saw (or experienced) in schools. This seminar, they felt, would provide answers to the questions they had about how to do such turnarounds.
