In the December 8th article by Stephen Sawchuk, Global Study Tracks Common Paths to Improving Schooling, we once again encounter international competition. Alfie Kohn, I am sure, has fits of rage whenever these studies are done.
The article basically states that sweeping reform based on other country's systems is not the key. A better method may be using specific strategies from those with similar performance trends. That is nice but we are Americans and we tend to be a bit of an all or nothing type of people of late. Why fire one teacher when you can fire a whole school!
Anyway, the article goes on to say lower performing schools are less teacher controlled and have curricula focused on consistency with little creativity or innovation.
Other weak points of schools that are underperforming are incentive funding for teachers and leadership that is unstable. I was pretty surprised and a bit disappointed to see the high turnover in the average school superintendent in US.
I can see that it will take self motivated teachers to improve schools that perform poorly but until teachers are allowed to teach without one hand tied behind their backs, improvement is a long way off.
It's like any good team. If there is stabilization at the top, you see success all over.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you posted comments on this article because I missed it originally. I feel that a study like this should have much to say to our nation's education leaders. The writer says that the report suggests "that school systems seeking to improve could do well by taking cues from the strategies used by those with similar performance trends—rather than trying to appropriate wholesale the techniques of the highest-performing countries." I'm struggling a bit to figure out what that means, but it feels critical.
ReplyDeleteThe report finds that lower performing schools with weaker teaching forces "tend to provide teachers with prescriptive curricula and pedagogical techniques to ease the delivery of lessons and ensure consistency across classrooms and access for all students to achieve basic literacy and numeracy." We don't have a weak teaching force in the US, yet many districts use very prescriptive curricula which tend to take the fun out of teaching in my opinion.