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
On technology in education
- 05-05-2011
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Blog by Ben Daley/Education Week
I am the Chief Academic Officer for High Tech High, a group of nine public charter schools in San Diego County, California. I was a founding physics teacher at High Tech High Original Recipe eleven years ago. Although our schools have "high tech" in their name, it is a bit of misnomer, as we are focused on having students work collaboratively to develop products for an authentic audience. We see technology as a tool in that work rather than as an end in itself. I also want to say that commenting on "the futures of school reform" makes me somewhat uneasy. My take on the past hundred years of attempted U.S. school reform is that it is largely a story of fierce ideological battles among writers, professors, and policy makers, while the actual practice of what happens in classrooms has remained largely unchanged. Witness for example, the charge I often hear that "progressive education is destroying U.S. public education." Given how little of the progressive education vision has actually been widely implemented in real classrooms makes it hard to believe that if U.S. public education has been destroyed, the culprit is "progressive education." I also note that John Dewey purportedly stated that he'd "rather have one school former than one hundred school reformers." (more...)
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