on Sep 16th, 2005Start with a clean slate for schools…
Whenever the topic of School or Educational reform comes up between my friends and me, I always argue that you can’t talk about school reform in the incremental.
You must talk about it wholesale.
Destroy everything and start all over.
Go in with zero pre-conceived ideas. Have only a list of results in mind for what a great K-12 education system should accomplish.
Do you even need grades (e.g. K-12)?
Do you even need grades as in A through F?
How big should a class be?
Who should teach? or lead? or mentor? or simply point the way to the books and other resources?
What should their training be?
Only by asking these questions can you talk about school reform.
Otherwise, all other discussions (class-size, periods per day, curriculum, teacher qualifications/pay and even school design) are just an exercise in futility.
An article yesterday in the Washington Post makes this same argument:
