Classroots.org

Scary Thoughts

Schools wound kids and adults. Our answer: more of the same.

Executive power over schools is expanding without checks and balances from teachers, parents, or students. Democracy is virtually extinct within schools outside of civics and government standards. It’s not impossible that scripted instruction and instructional designs from virtual and F2F content providers will abrogate teachers’ authority and moral imperative to plan instruction for their students. If Texas subscribes wholly to canned curricula, so goes the nation – “teacherproof.”

There are administrators and teachers out there so hamstrung by policy and the economy that they’re compromising their beliefs about kids and learning. They don’t even feel like they can speak out or support one another in doing the right thing. Those who do speak up or act out feel like they’re competing against the system rather than working with it.

While there are schools that succeed by every measure, including and apart from standardized testing, we’re scaling up accountability for testing, rather than for the other factors that make these schools successful.

The Fed, media, charter companies, and unscrupulous charter operators are stealing the charter movement and school choice from kids and parents who need niche schools to meet their needs and wants. School choice is about meeting kids’ needs, not about adults’ failings and power struggles.

Some Possibilities

Ad-hoc schools. An on-going Twitter conversation tagged #revolutioned hopes to create an alliance of teachers who link their classrooms into a cloud-school. Students in participating classrooms will have access to one another’s teachers, talents, and visiting experts. This nascent movement is also called the Rebel Education Alliance (#REA), a possible teachers’ rapid-response force to students’ needs and an un-union alternative to the NEA.

The Race Back Home initiative. School choice, the Race to the Top initiative (RttT), and the economy inspire school boards to charter their divisions into portfolio school systems, awarding the governance and accountability for each school to the team of educators, parents, and students that presents the most compelling and likely-to-succeed curriculum, instructional model, and assessment plan for each school and community. School boards and central offices assess the plans transparently, but also reserve the right to balance division-wide student needs via final differentiation of schools.

DIY classrooms, charters, learning centers and networks. Home-schooling, charter schools, virtual schools, project-based learning, self-directed learning, unschooling, open-source education, the maker aesthetic and ethic, student entrepreneurship, and drop-out education are all coming into play as alternatives to traditional public education. Thanks to social media, determined public school students and teachers can find expert support and models for the authentic learning made possible with each approach. Divisions should formalize their support for these options by publicly supporting teachers and chartering schools to take advantage of DIY resources in pursuit of achievement benchmarks.

Collaborating with – and profiting from – the competition. Local school divisions augment part-time enrollment options for students and educational organizations outside the system via multiple portals to exceptional teachers and courses. Divisions raise revenues and increase enrollment for state and federal funding formulas through virtual schools, teacher and course subscriptions, and second-shift leases of schools’ physical spaces and resources to educational organizations including home-school coöps.

Lateral pressure. Unopposed students and teachers engage in project-based, inquiry-driven, grade-free, service and entrepreneurship learning. They joyfully share learning in safe classrooms that have a real, positive impact on their communities’ well-being. Colleagues, other students, and other parents take note and ask administrators why such schooling isn’t the norm. Dissatisfied with answers about the importance of standardized testing, stake-holders agitate against test-driven instruction.

Which of these can you support? Which of these can you enact? With which of these do you disagree and on what grounds? Let’s puzzle it out together. To retweet Rob Lyons, “Viva la #revolutioned!!“