Saturday, April 27, 2013

“Good” Schools Seminar: Gleanings from a Class | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“Good” Schools Seminar: Gleanings from a Class | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:


“Good” Schools Seminar: Gleanings from a Class

For at least a decade I have taught a seminar for graduate students at Stanford called  “‘Good’ Schools: Policy, Research, and Practice.” The masters and doctoral students who take the course are committed, for the most part, to school improvement and reducing social injustices. They have scored high on the Graduate Record Exam and bring a strong record of prior academic achievement to the seminar.  Many have spent time in both charter and regular schools teaching either through Teach for America or after completing university-based teacher education programs. Even though they have attended and taught in schools under a regime of state curriculum standards, state tests, and the regulatory accountability of No Child Left Behind, they come to the seminar with varied visions of “good” schools imprinted in their minds.
In the seminar’s syllabus, I explain why I put “good” in quote marks.
“Good,” I tell my students, is obviously not a technical term but a common one that is in daily use by educators,