I read this intro to an essay by Art Levine on a DPI post and thought it had a lot of parallels to what we've been discussing in our class. The web address at the end of this posting on the site is where you can locate the essay. It's worth checking out - but it is a pretty long article. Levine explores the politics of education, and changes to education and society and how they have affected they way we teach are all issues we've talked about in class. A lot of the argument for more individualized education seems pretty well support in Levine's article. I thought of Sudbury and felt like aspects of their approach in letting kids move at their own pace and feel impassioned to to learn had some merit. Food for thought -read on!
NEW RULES, OLD RESPONSES
A revolution has occurred in America's expectations for its schools,
writes Art Levine. This essay discusses the nature, causes, and
consequences of that revolution. It describes a mismatch between what is
being demanded of the schools and what school people and government are actually thinking and doing. According to Levine, our education system
is caught between two worlds -- one dying and another being born. Many of today's most heated policy debates and reform efforts are rooted in the
dying world. They are premised on a uniform process of schooling for all
children, whether the constant is time, funding, salaries, curriculum or
pedagogy. The world being born is an outcome-based education system
driven by common standards for all students. The methods of educating students to achieve these standards will need to be flexible. The notion of a time-fixed education will have to give way to time-variable schooling.
The practice of moving students through school in assembly-line fashion by age will need to become increasingly individualized, with students
progressing as they achieve each outcome. The common curriculum will need to be replaced by pedagogies that fit specific student learning styles. Our funding of schools will need to reflect state standards. Rather than
providing preferential funding to the highly-affluent school districts,
our money will need to be invested according to what our children need
to achieve state standards. This will cause a reverse in funding, such that
urban schools and disadvantaged children receive higher funding than
their suburban peers. The work of our teachers will change. Instead of being the instructor at the front of the room, they will need to become the
diagnostician of student learning styles, the prescriptor of the best
means for each student to master the skills and knowledge that
constitute tate standards, and the assessor of student progress. This will require a much more highly-educated and skilled teacher force whose members must be paid significantly higher salaries. The same will hold true for our school administrators. All this work, and more, represents a transformation of our schools with the promise of making education more effective for our children and our society. Too often, education policy in the U.S. has become a political battlefield, in which issues such as vouchers, bilingual education and reading become matters not so much of how students learn best, but of competing orthodoxies.
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=4741