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Claus von Zastrow
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Claus commented on the article |There is another way--It's possible to create very substantitve change to existing schools to turn them around. The interventions would have to be clear, and the schools would need real capacity to make fundamental changes.
There is little research to suggest that the "start from scratch" model of school turnarounds is better than any other model.
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Claus commented on the article |Scott, I agree with you about the importance of assessments and accountability. But if the assessments and accountability systems are poorly designed, they create very perverse incentives and can do at least as much harm as good. That's why it's so important to invest much more energy in improving them.
There is unfortunately a LOT of research out there suggesting that our current systems for linking teachers to improvements in student learning are primitive at best. The future success of accountability depends on our ability to improve those systems dramatically.
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Claus commented on the article |
Thanks for the link to an interesting article with some good ideas. The article has a couple of flaws, however. First, it should call for a MUCH better system of assessments. The current assessments that will populate data systems haven't really earned our confidence, so the data systems themselves lose credibility. That is no trivial matter.
Second, it tends to overstate our knowledge about what works. The author writes, "True innovation in education now requires proving that successful models can be brought to scale to serve tens, even hundreds of thousands of students." That is true, but our paltry investment in education research and development makes this scale up process very difficult. Many of the innovations the article cites--TFA and excellent charters--are notoriously difficult to scale up for a variety of reasons. The stimulus money provides a very welcome shot in the arm, but we're going to have to sustain our investments in robust education R&D for much, much longer.
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Claus commented on the article |Sorry, but Borsuk's piece irked me. You can be all for change without necessarily supporting the rather limited portfolio of changes championed by many in the reform community. Why should mayoral reform or charters be the magic bullet? They can work very well IF they create real conditions for change in the classroom. In reality, though, charters are still more likely to do poorly than to do well, and some of our best urban districts--like Atlanta--do not employ mayoral control. (It would also have been gracious of Borsuk at least to acknowledge the controversy swirling around New York City's assessment results. Can NYC claim the success of mayoral control? It would help if we had more confidence in the assessment systems!)
The reality is that there are many kinds of change we should support, but governance changes that don't clearly lead to changes in teaching and learning don't impress me much. I wrote a bit more about this here:http://bit.ly/33AJTm
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Claus commented on the article |I should proofread. I meant to write "its downsides," not "it's downsides"!
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Claus commented on the article |
@Clay and @Tom: Without a doubt, many great writers have died poor, and much great literature has thrived at a time when writers weren't particularly well fed. Still, shouldn't we spare as much concern for the writers as we do for their craft? I'd hate to think that the stuff that really endures pays so little while the people who make money out of money continue to walk away fat and happy.
@Clay: Your account of online reading is very inspiring. (I've also been listening to some of the Yale lectures--John Rogers on Milton is one of my favorites.)
Still, it's probably safe to say that your and Shelly's online reading practices are quite different from those of many young readers out there. That's why it's so nice to know that teachers like you are helping students become such committed, engaged and savvy online readers. If schools ignore new media, they leave students to their own devices (literally), and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I found Shelly's comparison of 21st-century reading to medieval and Renaissance forms of reading and commentary very insightful. To me, though, there's a crucial difference. Many texts were devotional, and readers were in the habit of reading and re-reading them. What's more, even the wealthiest and best educated people had access to very few books, so they carefully glossed--and seldom glossed over--what they read.
Now, it's much easier to skip over passages, move from one text to another, search by keyword, etc.--all to arrive at our intended destinations much more quickly. I do it all the time, because--as Clay suggested--the internet is almost like Borges's infinite library, full of both meaning and gibberish.
This kind of reading has it's downsides. I remember reading a New York Times article in which teen-agers described their reading habits. They described how easy it is to skip "irrelevant" and "boring" details and get to what they want much more quickly. One fan fiction enthusiast described how she could change books so that characters she liked survived and those she didn't died." Don't you think this kind of reading can become a form of wish-fulfillment that reinforces our prejudices and widens our blind spots? Sometimes, a seemingly boring or irrelevant passage proves enlightening in retrospect. Sometimes we don't recognize the importance of seemingly trivial details until much later on. Sometimes we have to follow another writer's path from start to finish to learn something new.
So.... Online reading has tremendous benefits to those who can use it well, but aren't there also some potential pitfalls? In either case, it seems, schools should not shun new technologies.
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Claus commented on the article |
I would love to see your class, Shelley. It sounds amazing--a perfect marriage of 21st-century media and classical content.
I do still worry about the effects of online reading habits on student attention--though your approach seems to inspire students' sustained attention, collaboration and active engagement. Perhaps that's the best reason for using 21st-century technologies in schools rather than abandoning those technologies entirely to popular culture.
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Claus commented on the article |
Much of what you write resonates with me, though Tom's concerns seem valid.
Another concern: Who, exactly, is the "we" that glosses online texts so eagerly, and how valuable is much of that glossing? There is certainly a core of on-line readers who are every bit as engaged in their reading as were the Renaissance humanists who left their curious script all over manuscripts and early printed books.
I've seen some anecdotal research on teen-agers' on-line reading habits that could be construed as encouraging or worrisome, depending on your point of view. Encouraging, because many non-readers are now reading more on-line than they ever did in books. Worrying, because much of that reading is of the hunt-and-peck, episodic variety encouraged by hyperlinked texts.
Early manuscripts covered with annotations reflected multiple readers' sustained engagement with a single text--a sort of extended dialogue, across generations, of readers and writers with prodigious attention spans.
It's not clear to me that many young readers reading and commenting on on-line text enjoy the same sustained engagement with texts that challenge the understanding and reward long effort with often unexpected insights.
There was also, of course, the disturbing National Endowment of the Arts study suggesting that young people read fewer books for pleasure than they used to--so many new media competing for their attention. Is it possible that actual books promote greater patience and attentiveness? Could it be that the story of on-line reading is one of something lost and something gained?
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Claus commented on the article |The evidence of cheating certainly is troubling. Even more troubling is the fact that we lack reliable measures to judge the quality of public schools, whether charter or traditional.
A recent Harvard study found evidence of minimal cognitive demand in high-performing Massachusetts charter schools. The authors attributed the lack of intellectual ambition to the incentives created by state assessments.
Of course, this problem is not at all limited to charters. Without a richer assessment system, it's difficult to identify the kinds of practices that produce the outcomes we really want -
Claus commented on the article |Very interesting discussion! This does seem to raise questions about the authority of the teacher and the students. How to ensure quality and substance, defend against ideologues, empower students, etc?
I look forward to hearing about the results of the unit. It sounds like it will be terrific.
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