Names have power, so it makes sense that young humans, who are generally in search of both identity and some amount of power over their own lives, will often try to exert some control over their own names.
Greene says it is not difficult to acknowledge a student’s name preference:
Did I agree with all of them? No more than I agreed with some of my students’ questionable fashion choices. But it cost me nothing to honor these preferences, to give students that small measure of control over their own identities. It was a small thing for me, but a thing that helped make my classroom a safe, welcoming space where we could get on with the work of learning to be better at reading, writing, speaking and listening.
Just a couple of decades ago, teachers at conferences heard that smartphones were the education tool of the future. Now it appears that the national mood is to take broad steps to keep those devices out of classrooms.
Education writer Peter Greene takes a look at the history of the Achievement School District and the factors that led to its downfall in a recent piece in Forbes. Here’s more:
The ASD grew too quickly. It tried to scale up to the point of being ineffective for some schools. It did a lousy job of listening to the community, and depended too much on folks from outside, instead of growing a local, sustainable support culture. Also, turning around a school takes time.
School takeover models remain one of the great policy artifacts of ed reform hubris, the notion that if we just let the right people grab the wheel, they can fix things right up (because, honestly, the education professionals and experts either don’t know or aren’t trying). But one of the repeated lessons of the last decade is that school turnaround via takeover is really hard to pull off.
Peter Greene takes on the myth of market magic in this explainer on the charter sector in Memphis. He notes:
Nor are the schools well-distributed. Check this map and you’ll see that some neighborhoods have clusters of charter schools, while other areas of the county have none at all. It’s almost as if market forces do not drive charter businesses to try to serve all students, but only concentrate on the markets they find attractive! Go figure.
The problem did not happen overnight– a local television station did a story entitled “Charter Schools– Too Many? Too Fast?” back in 2017. The answer was, “Probably yes to both.” But it also included the projection that SCS would some day be all charter. It does appear that Shelby County is in danger of entering the public school death spiral, where charters drain so much money from the public system that the public system stumbles, making the charters more appealing, so more students leave the public system, meaning the public system gets less and less money, making charters more appealing, so students leave, rinse and repeat until your public system collapses.
Greene does note there is some good news:
Shelby County Schools is developing guidelines that would determine if a neighborhood has too many charter schools, addressing a longtime concern of school board members.
The charter school guidelines, called the Educational Priorities Document/Rubric in a proposed district policy on charter schools, would also prioritize what the district wants charter schools to focus on, such as early literacy.
Greene asks that we all watch to see if market magic remains the focus, or if some semblance of sanity returns to public education in Shelby County.
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