Courtesy Success Academies
by James C. Sherlock
Sometimes things are so right in front of you that you look past them.
I have been studying public education in Virginia for more than 15 years.
The policy face of the teaching and learning is — there is no other word for it — depressing, at least to the degree that those policies as written can be decoded into English.
Especially when our schools’ processes are constantly re-engineered at the behest of the education establishment. Teachers and students struggle to adjust to policies that are said to “work” in small, targeted studies but prove after enormous effort and expense not to scale as predicted. Or they work in the best schools and not in the worst.
At the federal level, the VDOE level, the ed school level and the local school division level, policies are frenetically changed to clean up problems real or perceived.
Virtually no solution I have seen focuses on enhancing the joys of teaching and learning.
The best individual schools in Virginia can and many certainly do focus on joy. But that is not what they are told to do. And clearly many don’t do it.
It is no wonder SOL scores in many schools continue to be dismal, teachers and students quit and students are chronically absent in droves.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Continue reading
