History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Again, niche reforms are not the answer
- 08-09-2011
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Guest blog by David K. Cohen/Shanker Blog
A recent response to my previous post on these pages helps to underscore one of my central points: If there is no clarity about what it will take to improve schools, it will be difficult to design a system that can do it. In a recent essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough wrote that education reformers who advocated “no excuses” schooling were now making excuses for reformed schools’ weak performance. He explained why: “ Most likely for the same reason that urban educators from an earlier generation made excuses: successfully educating large numbers of low-income kids is very, very hard.” In his post criticizing my initial essay, “What does it mean to ‘fix the system’?,” the Fordham Institute’s Chris Tessone told the story of how Newark Public Schools tried to meet the requirements of a federal school turnaround grant. The terms of the grant required that each of three failing high school replace at least half of their staff. The schools, he wrote, met this requirement largely by swapping a portion of their staffs with one another, a process which Tessone and school administrators refer to as the “dance of the lemons.”Would such replacement be likely to solve the problem? (more...)
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