February 19, 2008
Rhee Turns to Curriculum, Special Ed Issues
It's been a busy month for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. First she successfully quashed the opposition to her proposed school closures, and then hatched plans to outsource food services for the District's school cafeterias.
This week, she's turned her focus to classroom instruction, an area to which her critics say she hasn’t yet paid sufficient attention. The Post reported this morning on an experimental special education initiative designed to reduce one of DCPS's biggest expenditures, and wrote yesterday that Rhee and her office are considering a range of reforms to address low achievement at the 27 district schools that have failed to meet reading and math requirements for the last five years under the No Child Left Behind law. The District must select one of the following interventions for each of the schools: converting it to a charter school, hiring an education-management firm to run it, replacing all of its staff, turning it over to the state (or in the District's case, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education) or creating an alternative proposal.
Rhee's mostly looking toward the last option, suggesting reforms like scripted curricula (in which teachers literally read from a script while teaching), extended school days and weeks, career-themed “schools within schools,” and grouping overage students in to specialized classes.
Implementing these kinds of large-scale initiatives (and making them work) would be a major feat for Rhee, and could gain some valuable ground toward building better schools. However, teacher and parent buy-in is going to be a huge factor. For example, teachers tend to be resistant towards scripted curriculum programs (can you blame them?), and their effectiveness has been proven to be directly linked with teacher cooperation. Already, PTAs for some of the schools up for restructuring have started to protest elements of the proposed reforms, and parents and teachers at Roosevelt and Coolidge senior highs in Northwest, and Woodson and Eastern senior highs in Northeast, have decided to create their own restructuring plans which they will submit for approval.
The options being considered by the chancellor's office include some controversial measures that may leave a lot of education policy types howling, but it's also plain that the typically inoffensive baby steps to reform aren't cutting it in D.C.'s public schools. It's going to take some substantial shake-ups to change the trajectory of the past 30 years. We'll have to wait and see if Rhee gets a chance to do some shaking, or the support she'll need to post results.
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i don't know much about her policy positions, but that senior class portrait is awesome!
agreed with the teachers on the scripted curricula. i mean, what's the point in having a teacher then? we could just hire local actors so they would have a chance to practice their elocution.
Scripted curricula = boring as all hell. It's that kind of crap that made me completely tune out in Jr High (once I learned how to do the required busy work quickly so I could go read stuff that was actually interesting). You'd think some of the folks coming up with these ideas had never actually been in a classroom as a student.
why don't they ask Hillary Clinton? She claims to have all the solutions.
Her dress looks like the rooms in the Japan Culture exhibits!
The "differentiated learning" concept is not meant to span differences as great as these. This plan is a transparent rush job, an attempt to avoid the logistical complexities of setting up Gifted and Talented programs and legitimate Special Ed measures. It may simply chance confuse and distract kids and disrupt classrooms.
This plan avoids sending Special Ed students to private out-of-town facilities by bringing private consultants into DC schools. While this is an excellent temporary measure, we have proof of the adage "Nothing is as permanent as a temporary measure." Sending kids out-of-town was instituted as a temporary measure.
That should be
It may simply confuse and distract kids and disrupt classrooms.
Sorry if I confused the class.
I just want to say: Rheetarded.
Sorry to anyone who I may have just offended, hurt, or peed on.
That said, the career-themed "schools within schools" seems to give up on hope for the students to receive a strong general education in the District. Maybe Rhee thought, "Well they'll be going to DeVry unless we overhaul our teaching, so let's just save everybody the time and overhaul our system to be just like DeVry." Even with a variety of programs, would DC Public Schools be able to find great engineering, law, writing, and arts career teachers as easily as people to train future mechanics and clerks? How about just developing good "classes within schools" so the kids graduate as well-rounded as possible, and will have covered more academic bases before they pursue careers and/or further education.
I went to a high school that had a school within a school thing going on, but I'm not sure it was much of a success. But credit to Rhee for not taking the until-now-popular fire everyone option. And setting up a separate schedule for 'overage' students who "often are extremely disruptive, bully their much smaller peers and drop out," sounds like it will be well received by smaller students throughout the DCPS system.
Suggesting that teachers use scripts is completely insulting, effectively strips the creativity and innovation out of the profession, and renders a low-paying but interesting job into a rote drill. It is, however, one inevitable result of obsessively tracking test scores instead of using authentic assessment measures. At least we can be happy that the DC curriculum is aligned with the standardized tests nowadays...it's only been about 5 years (or less) since they figured out those two things should dovetail.
Ms. Rhee is not talking about "schools-within-schools." If she is using the current buzzword appropriately, she is talking about "three classes in one classroom." There will be 3 teachers in the same room at the same time. This may work for kids with a narrower spectrum of needs and abilities, or a sprinkling of “mainstreamed” kids per class, but not as described. For this to work, each classroom teacher would have to spend extra prep hours with each specialist for each lesson and cooperate seamlessly with them on the fly. Given the current state of the system, chances of pulling this off successfully are pretty low.
If this is not what Ms. Rhee is proposing, she needs to be more specific and call it something else.
I fully support IMGoph's suggestion that we replace teachers with actors reading scripts! They will be much better looking (thus students paying more attention), and will not have the all too familiar problem of too much "proffesional dignity" to dress up in funny costumes while they read the boilerplate curriculum on earth sciences.
Hell, just give the students library cards, a list of books to read, test them once a year, and be done with it. If they pass the tests they can go on to wonderful careers in jobs they hate and spend thier life dreaming of not working, if they fail- um there is always prison like now?
"Actors replace teachers, salaries immediately rises 6 time over" I can see the headline now
There is a major problem in using "scripted lessons" in the classroom: the kids stubbornly refuse to learn their lines.
Can you spell S-T-U-P-I-D?