"Fourteen reasons schools are troubled (and no, it’s not all about teachers)
* Inept local school boards; this is not just an off-hand pejorative,
but the result of decades of refusal of states to attempt serious
reform of how boards are chosen and held accountable. There is also this
puzzling conundrum: How does a group of intelligent, generally
public-spirited, and frequently professional citizens taken
individually, turn into a paranoid, secretive, and self-righteous
organization, that either micromanages, plugs minutiae, or hides and is
intimidated by school administration?
* Politicized state boards of education as a byproduct of the mashup
of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and ideology, leaving even
educationally aware departments caught between the U.S. Department of
Education, state legislatures, and limited dollar resources and
information to assert better strategies.
* A corporate testing and textbook oligopoly, producing testing
that bypasses genuine learning; now suspect of even rigging some
testing to assure failures, to sustain the demand for tests and scoring.
* A small army of opportunistic charter school and voucher entrepreneurs.
* The U.S. Department of Education, that as late as a couple of years ago was actually focusing on legitimate classroom research on what actually works.
* A pedantic or “tracked” Arne Duncan, and misinformed President
Obama, who in a liberal surge to erase educational inequity have smashed
head-on into the “law of unintended consequences.”
* The political right wing’s sworn enemies of public education.
* Naïve advocacy by Gates and Kopp,
et al., including even the now highly praised Kahn Academy and its
bite-sized learning menu abstracted from MIT’s free STEM and other
curricula, that still manage to bypass genuine knowledge creation as
defined by students of learning.
* A sluggish and partisan U.S. Congress, that could have made No Child Left Behind into something rational.
* The K-12 public education establishment itself, and its unions,
that delayed far too long to start internally reforming their strategies
and rubrics to respond to both market needs, organizational innovation,
and the neural science of learning firming up in the last decade.
* Most of our collegiate schools of education that have taken a knee
or run for cover rather than stand up and execute needed self-reform.
* Growing American economic and cultural poverty surrounding too many
of its children, and that even when it was earlier improving, was still
an acknowledged tactical impediment to learning for many children at
the classroom level."
aqui.
