Brooks stodgy thinking

APS Supt Winston Brooks has recently set a new graduation rate goal of 75 percent, link. His battle plan; more of the same;

• extending the day at our comprehensive high schools
• offering programs like AVID at more than two dozen of our schools 
• continue small learning communities and advisories, and 
• professional learning communities ...

Albert Einstein is widely, albeit incorrectly credited, link, with offering the observation; "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results."  If your horse is running as fast as it can, whipping harder is not going to make it run faster, not 30% faster.

If we want to close the gap on the 30% of students who don't graduate, it won't follow offering more of the same.  Obviously, there are a relative handful of students who do benefit from "extending the day".  But they're never going to be more than a handful.  The vast majority of students who fail, need something vastly different than what they are being offered.  That "something" is within the grasp of educators, but only educators who are released from the constraints of the cemetery seating paradigm (five rows of six desks, everyone in the same book, on same page, everyday for twelve years).

We need bold new ideas; whole new paradigms different from the stodgy thinking of educational oligarchies and "nobody ever got fired for doing things the way they've always been done" thinking.  Those ideas won't come from people deeply invested maintaining the status quo.

The ideas will come from teachers, who in APS alone, have nearly 100,000 years of ongoing teaching experience.  Stodgy thinking keeps them from a seat at the table where the future is planned.

Stodgy thinking is satisfied with growth in graduation rates that is within the margin of error in calculating them.




photo Mark Bralley