>>>>> "Dan" == Dan McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Dan> http://www.startribune.com/stories/1405/5131594.html I am
Dan> skeptical of Pawlenty's plan to copy Edmonton. They have a
Dan> very different system and population - parochial schools get
Dan> public funding in Canada. He mentioned thinking sports
Dan> based, all girls schools and Christian principled schools
Dan> were fabulous. How would that work in MPLS?
Dan> I suppose we could have avoided a lot of the hand wringing of the
Dan> last year if schools had control of 92% of their budgets,
Dan> that is assuming they also had control over enrollments.
Dan> Dan McGuire
Dan> Ericsson
I'm inclined to agree with Dan on this one. I read over the
Star-Tribune article, and a couple of points leaped out at me. The
first is that Edmonton has a very homogenous school-age population.
The second was the mixture of church and state that Dan pointed out.
The third was a little sentence dropped in there to the effect that
Edmonton hasn't seen that much of a testable effect from these
changes.
Given that Edmonton may be seized upon as a paradigm for Minnesota
schools, I'd love to see a feature-length story about the school
system, especially one that's informed by an interest in promising new
techniques, but that has a healthy dose of skepticism about the latest
Big Thing, too. Steve Brandt --- any chance of this?
On the one hand, I've been very impressed with the people I see doing
the educating in our local school (and, actually, in the other 6 or 7
that I toured before our oldest went in), and I think anything that we
can do to empower them to follow their best judgment will be good.
I know that testing isn't perfect, but I'm also interested in having
some outcome measures to help us evaluate our schools. It's almost a
cliche now to belly-ache about the fact that students have to learn to
the tests and teachers have to teach to them. But that really doesn't
seem so poisonous to me. Taking tests is a pretty darn valuable skill
in our society, and I can't imagine it getting to be less valuable in
the foreseeable future. [OK, it's not perfect, but it doesn't seem
like a disaster when stacked up against AIDS, homelessness, or any of
the things we might get really exercised about, including the way our
schools are failing many of our children.]
That's good. Here are some reasons why we might be skeptical:
1. this sounds like another example of someone (in this case
Pawlenty) grabbing after yet another silver bullet to stop the
education crisis. I suspect if there were a silver bullet out
there, it would have been found by now. My guess is that there
isn't going to be any magical solution, just hard work, and a
constant struggle to make schools work.
2. I further suspect that Pawlenty is grabbing up this silver bullet
as a substitute for spending the money that needs to be spent. At
best it's a well-meaning distraction from our ongoing fiscal
crisis. At worst, it's a deceitful distraction.
When someone tells you they have a magical solution to the
education crisis, I think you should react the same way as you
would if someone told you that they had a sure-fire way to beat
the stock market...
3. I'm worried about these approaches that penalize schools that are
failing. OK, penalize the principal, boot the management. But if
you penalize the school, you penalize its community, just adding
to its victimization. Don't break it further! Fix it!
4. We're not good at measuring the performance of schools serving
radically different populations. Consider, by analogy, trying to
measure the performance of a hospital. Would you expect the Mayo
clinic to have a low death rate? Well, no. They would be taking
on the most challenging cases, and they wouldn't be doing as well
as a hospital that just does a zillion minor surgeries and
childbirths (although you might want to go to that second
hospital, instead of Mayo, for your delivery). Our measuring
instruments for education just aren't good enough to correct for
these external factors.
Now, I'm not saying that's an argument for not testing --- you do
want to know how well the kids are doing. But you ought to think
hard before you beat a school in Phillips for getting worse test
scores than one in Eagen...
5. Tight local control of schools is a mantra of both left and right
in this country (on the left it's communitarianism, and on the
right, there's a lot of talk about market-based approaches). Is
this maybe nutty? Where are there schools that work well? Europe
and Asia. There schools are run nationally, there's no emphasis
at all on market-based forces, and they tend to be run in
standardized ways in accordance with national bureaucracies.
[But, in favor of the Edmonton method, elsewhere in the world,
teachers are generally accorded far more respect as members of the
community than they are in the United States. Teaching is a
relatively high-status job, and teachers are treated as
professionals whose judgment is to be respected.]
Why do we have to go haring off to Edmonton to look at something
that's unconventional for Canada? Why don't we just look at what
works in Western Europe, Canada at large, and Asia?
This drives me batty --- we're trashing our Universities, that are
the best in the world, with nutty experiments and funding cuts,
and we're refusing to look at what works in the world as a whole
in our elementary and secondary schools, which by and large don't
work.
Wow! I feel like Tom on "Car Talk"! "Don't get me started!"
Cheers all,
--
Robert P. Goldman
ECCO
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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