Mrs. Lipstick has a very clear understanding in this post about what teachers do, that a lot of people don’t seem to get. Go read it, and then come back, or go and read some of the comments on the article she cites.
As much as it pains me to say this, Central Falls, RI, will only be the first school this happens to — not the last. By the fifth or tenth or fiftieth school, it will fail to stir outrage. By the hundredth school, it will fail to be news outside of its own community.
There is a strong desire to re-make American education from the top down, and the laws and grand grant programs of the last decade seem uniquely suited to carrying out that vision. The “little people” who stand in the way of that vision are going to be rudely pushed aside for a little while as those forces push for the logical conclusions of the programs.
But the other side of the coin is the real problem. We aren’t about to get some new educational plan out of all of this. There isn’t going to be some new tech-based teaching style and there isn’t going to be a massive shift to a new, progressive creativity-based approach in the classroom, with a lot of innovation in the classroom, and a lot of effort to institute change.
Because a lot of teachers just got scared for their jobs. A lot of teachers just got put on notice that they can’t negotiate, and they can’t argue, and they can’t dawdle or delay or fight back, even though they can’t afford to toe the line.
There’s going to be a whole lot of FutureShock going on.
I wonder what the second school is going to be to close its doors? And I really want to know what poor school will close its doors, never to reopen them again.
I hope it’s not yours. Or mine.
[…] to take other roads to learning and education. A lot of it was in the then-context of the Central Falls, RI, decision to shut down their high school and try to remake it. What have we heard about since then? Not so much nationally. And we know that most […]