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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-02-12

More Education Reform

I'm always interested to hear about education reform trends--most of them (lately, anyway) are little more than belated common sense.

Like this one:

New York State, desperate to improve the quality of its middle schools, is giving educators more freedom to experiment, relaxing some of the strict requirements that for two decades have dictated how many minutes students spend on specific subjects.

The new policy, which the Board of Regents announced yesterday, will give educators in failing schools the ability to spend less time on nonacademic subjects like arts and home and career skills and more time on math and reading, if they see fit.

Remarkable that a liberal haven like New York would reform by returning some of the control to the local schools.

However, the cause for this reform should give everybody a very disheartening pause:

The policy was approved after a nearly three-year process in which the state's Education Department scoured the country to figure out what makes middle schools work, but failed to find one successful model to bring back to New York. [emphasis mine]

If you have kids, and wonder what middle school is going to be like for them, well . . . think home school.
Posted by: Michael / 2/12/2005 01:11:00 AM

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