Comments on: Not Just Change. Transformation.

By: Gerald

Gerald — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:06:17 +0000

Thanks for your comment. Your point is well taken, and I agree with your point about differentiation. As a teacher of gifted students, I see teachers wrestle every day with the nearly impossible task of differentiating within a narrowly defined curriculum.

I think what I was getting at was not so much a national campaign focusing on schools, but more a national agenda dedicated to creating an environment that would inspire schools to thrive on innovation, flexibility, and attention to individual students. In an attempt to be clever with my words, I communicated the wrong idea.

I still think, though, that NCLB has actually done the opposite of what it was intended to do. Instead of challenging schools to bring all students up to a level of proficiency, what we have now is an environment in which schools are strangled into avoiding failure. Excellence takes risk, and in the current environment, risk gets punished.

By: Wesley Fryer

Wesley Fryer — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:03:21 +0000

I disagree that we need a national educational campaign for “leave no school behind.” I think the focus should properly move back to students, not test scores. As Clayton Christensen notes, disruptive technologies are playing a pivotal role in the changes we see in organizations including schools. Personalization of learning is one of the most basic disruptive benefits which new technologies offer us. I think a MAJOR part of the problem with U.S. educational policies to date is standardization. Rather than standardization, we need differentiation. There is NOT just one way to learn how to read, and it is both arrogant as well as counterproductive for a society to insist there are a limited and uniform set of standards by which learning excellence should be defined in our schools.

Thanks for the reference to Robert Sternberg’s book, I haven’t read it and have added it to my Amazon wish list.