Thank you for writing out your thoughts! I’ll have to save this and will use it as an automatic reply and send it anytime anyone brings out the rhetorical tropes about schools.
I always enjoy your posts, but this one is so powerful - thank you for sharing your thoughts and reflections about education as well as your dedication to it. This needs to be shared everywhere - I am going to start with posting my community feeds!
Great points here. It's also easier (lazier?) intellectually to imagine a great vision of school when starting from scratch, than it is to grapple with the challenging, nuanced, real problems that schools face, and that any new model would certainly face as well.
As a related aside, I'd suggest that instead of advocating for tearing down the school system for all, we should welcome innovative school models around or apart from the public school system. And see if there's anything those models learn that the traditional school system can adopt.
I agree. I'm totally in favor of experimenting and trying new things. But if the attitude is "we're disrupting education/inventing a new way to do school" I know it's not going to work. If the attitude is "here is a place we feel like we could improve classroom teaching" or "here is a way we can help kids who slip through the cracks of the current system," that's a better place to start.
You and your readers also would probably love the “Have you heard?” Podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider (one of Larry’s former graduate students).
This is such a refreshing post DK! Thank you. I agree! And I get upset (with myself) when I get pulled into it. School is good. Education is also highly complex system - so of course there are problems. And, as your other reader said, any reinvention will inherently have to grapple with that complexity and will inevitably have problems too.
Incidentally, I regularly read Larry Cuban’s blog (coauthor of Tinkering…) and find his longview perspective to be soooo valuable.
Thank you for writing out your thoughts! I’ll have to save this and will use it as an automatic reply and send it anytime anyone brings out the rhetorical tropes about schools.
After teaching for six years, this resonates with me. Thanks for writing and sharing it.
I always enjoy your posts, but this one is so powerful - thank you for sharing your thoughts and reflections about education as well as your dedication to it. This needs to be shared everywhere - I am going to start with posting my community feeds!
Great points here. It's also easier (lazier?) intellectually to imagine a great vision of school when starting from scratch, than it is to grapple with the challenging, nuanced, real problems that schools face, and that any new model would certainly face as well.
As a related aside, I'd suggest that instead of advocating for tearing down the school system for all, we should welcome innovative school models around or apart from the public school system. And see if there's anything those models learn that the traditional school system can adopt.
I agree. I'm totally in favor of experimenting and trying new things. But if the attitude is "we're disrupting education/inventing a new way to do school" I know it's not going to work. If the attitude is "here is a place we feel like we could improve classroom teaching" or "here is a way we can help kids who slip through the cracks of the current system," that's a better place to start.
You and your readers also would probably love the “Have you heard?” Podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider (one of Larry’s former graduate students).
Here’s an episode with Larry on as a guest:
https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/episodes/161-ai-is-going-to-upend-public-education-or-maybe-not
This is such a refreshing post DK! Thank you. I agree! And I get upset (with myself) when I get pulled into it. School is good. Education is also highly complex system - so of course there are problems. And, as your other reader said, any reinvention will inherently have to grapple with that complexity and will inevitably have problems too.
Incidentally, I regularly read Larry Cuban’s blog (coauthor of Tinkering…) and find his longview perspective to be soooo valuable.
Here’s his blog: https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/
If you’re interested, I also did a whole 4-part series on his prompt to reject the “school transformation “ hype. Here’s the first one: https://beccakatz.substack.com/p/transformation-revolution-and-other
Thank you! ❤️
Thanks Becca!