School Reform Through a Subversive Lens

With all the energy and angst swirling around the current issues of school reform, it must be said that fighting to simply maintain the status quo, prior to budget cuts, isn't good enough. The book Teaching As A Subversive Activity highlights the problems inherent in bureaucracy and the aversion to change which is an inherent part of that culture. If all we do, as teachers, is roll out new window dressing on the same tired old bureaucratic system, we fail our kids miserably. New textbooks that celebrate core curriculum alignment keep the top down teaching stubbornly in place. The essential questions are printed for teacher to spoon feed to student. The stop marks are scripted to guide supposed student inquiry. Shouldn't we, as teachers, have students read books and then ask them to identify the essential questions? Do we not trust that the eager young mind will formulate a running theme in paired narratives? The company line is that this so- called reform will prepare students for the 21st century, but close inspection shows that the same hierarchy exists in the classroom. It is imperative that a new breed of teacher creates a classroom culture of true student inquiry and risk taking which leads to growth. Administrators will support the subversive when the proof shows up in rising test scores, as it surely will!

Thoughts on moving beyond 20th century and Class Struggle

As I combine readings on bringing classrooms into the 21st century and Class Matters, it occurs to me that the missing piece is providing urban and lower income schools with the technologically advanced classrooms that suburban students and teachers enjoy. If Rip van Winkle were to return a decade from now, would he find two very different scenarios? One being an urban classroom, which looks very familiar to him and the other, a suburban classroom, which boasts so many multiple genre activities that Rip is lost in his understanding of the classroom activities. It is not sufficient to simply say that urban kids don't all have Internet and computers at home, so we must work the old fashioned way. (Yes I have heard this very statement). It is imperative that we, as a society, outfit urban classrooms with the latest in technology so that students who can't gain access at home are prepared for the wider world and all it's opportunities. It is not good enough to have carts of laptops with half the laptops in disrepair. A decade ago, teachers found grants to be easily obtained for technology updates. In a tightening economy, grants are harder to find so it becomes a moral imperative for education lobbyists to campaign for wealthy corporations and individuals to outfit low income classrooms with smart boards and laptops or iPads. If the money being spent on testing materials and core curriculum aligned text books were spent on updating classrooms, that would give low income kids a better advantage in life. It would be a more honest and altruistic investment in these young lives.