Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Answer Sheet - What D.C. schools need now: A departure from Rheeism

The Answer Sheet - What D.C. schools need now: A departure from Rheeism

What D.C. schools need now: A departure from Rheeism

Grand experiments certainly are grand, but they have no real place in the world of education. It’s time for them to stop and for schools to get down to the business of building strong teams to use what is already known about how to build successful schools. There is some notion buried in our educational experiments that we still don’t really know how to teach kids, or that there is some silver bullet waiting to be discovered. We do know how, and there isn’t a magical answer. The problem is that a lot of elements go into making a school a success -- a truth that many of today’s school reformers choose to ignore. It’s the teacher, they say, and, well, of course it is the teacher. But it is also: