Goals: I’d like for it to be a quick starting point for discussions of the real, addressable problems of failing, inner city, minority schools. These sorts of two page summaries are popular among the software development crowd, and I thought I’d see if we can’t jumpstart a wider discussion of the problems by introducing a breadth of resources in one sweep. Wouldn’t mind if it came to be used in some ed schools.

The strange bedfellows character: partly my trying to include different sides. Yet these are strange days. The very idea of Al Sharpton breaking the union/civil-rights/DNC monolith is amazing enough. And today, I listened to the most stunning interview with the President of the DC Teachers Union.* Times are changing–but they can still go backward.

The balance among the topics doesn’t seem entirely right yet – too many video links from the same source; too few references from the Rothstein crowd maybe.

And theres no good reference document as to how de-unionizing could lead to more research-based, user-developed, curriculum & learningware.

What do you think?

* Not the Only Kid on the Block-Education Podcast with John Merrow #112: George Parker, president of Washington DC’s Teachers Union, shares some astonishing confessions about the lack of accountability in the union and how it’s affecting competition between public and charter schools.

(When, of course, if not strolling campus or the beach, you could be getting back to me on the two-page pdf review!)

Actually, what I wanted to comment on here was the idea that “school leaders need to be informed and critical consumers of research.” Not disagreeing with the principle, but the reality of the way schools are organized is that there will be precious little time indeed “to not just accept what others say about the research base for a given program. …to find and critique the research base themselves.”

What we need is for school leaders to begin to recognize that their economic model doesn’t allow for this type of well-considered study, the way, say Boeing might, and begin making the switches to models that do.
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In addition, there seem to be two different points here: kids are anti-intellectual and school is boring. I wonder if they make any connection between making school more fulfilling and making kids more intellectual? Are schools the only ones at fault for raising these “passive consumers”? When I read that, I wondered if they had looked at any of the Pew Internet data that shows that kids are actually creating and interacting online, not just consuming.

All in all, you got it right: this is very frustrating!