tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14707730.post8728935580639115523..comments2024-02-24T19:49:45.687-05:00Comments on Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 4James Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04462754705431590571noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14707730.post-1860256982545537842016-08-13T16:58:28.812-04:002016-08-13T16:58:28.812-04:00There will be no increase in student outcomes for ...There will be no increase in student outcomes for under performing schools as there is no will to attach the causes. The educational industrial reformers complex is based on an ideal where all students will attain a quantified amount of educational credentials to proceed to college. From college, it is argued these students will attains some sort of educational salvation, where the scales of ignorance and sloth will fall from their eyes,and high paying jobs are waiting for them, with the promise of a McMansion on a leafy cul-de-sac. Today's reformers base their ideas on the fact that they followed this path and it worked for them. They followed a primarily liberal arts or updated classical educational model and as this bromide worked for them, it will work for everyone. They are unable to understand that our economy requires people with many different skill sets, and that the standard academic path is only appropriate for some of these talents.<br />Currently there is massive amounts of time and energy spent in the perpetuation of a <br />educational reform through policy change. Few if any of the reformers have spent time in the classroom, especially in those "nonperforming classrooms" to see first hand the barriers students have to overcome. Additionally the American middle class, especially the white middle class is unwilling to admit that the benefits it realized, since the 2nd world war, were skewed in their favor. The accept no responsibility for the need to recompense those who were disenfranchised with an equal skewing. <br /> Chris Doellerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14315475142017501313noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14707730.post-54288223942222255842016-08-08T15:25:21.857-04:002016-08-08T15:25:21.857-04:00Thank you for this well-researched post. Here'...Thank you for this well-researched post. Here's the rant that I composed while reading it (with a critique of competency based education a la earning digital badges/certificates thrown in): What contributed to the limiting of many previous rapidly infectious diseases such as cholera in developed countries? Public health policies of sanitation requiring infrastructure devised for the public good--clean water and effective waste water management. (Tragically even this victory has been dangerously compromised in our densely populated urban areas such as Flint, Michigan.) What we require to revive our public schools, which have been pummeled by continually changing but consistently punitive mandates such as high-stakes standardized testing based on fatally flawed standardized curricula, is a public policy initiative that starts from the actual needs of children, families, schools, and communities, not their theoretical needs based on corporatist theories that profit the elite at the (literal and figurative) expense of the general public. There is an urgent need for all communities, not only suburban/wealthy communities, to have a voice in the provision and accessibility of educational methods that honor the children's communities instead of futilely and immorally trying to mold them into the warped vision of their usefulness for the corporate vision of society. Humans are a social species, but not modeled on the hive societies of ants. Human societies must accommodate the unique potential of each individual within thriving, multi-faceted groups, with reverence for the heart-sustaining traditions of the past and sensitivity to the heart-sustaining promises of the future. A wholesale shift to all digital learning all the time, with individualistic striving for badges/certifications to maximize the potential of the individual to satisfy the ever-increasing and callous demands of an impersonal, corporatized economy, is a dystopian vision that those of us who have experience relating to actual children must do everything in our power to prevent.Sheila Ressegerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03825902968436088673noreply@blogger.com