Reading this extended essay on the significance of checklists in medicine, and I’m struck by how education policy makers seem to have completely misunderstood Gawande’s message.

The real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity–where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns–efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. (p.79)

Most educational reform these days is about stripping away the power from teachers and individuals, as if the situations they face in their classrooms can be simplified to a checklist. But…Gawande continues:

Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals either–that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation–expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.

This is where empowering teachers (or at least acknowledging that they’re not interchangeable) becomes so important. Teachers cannot do it alone, but that does not mean that each move ought to be scripted…

At a school today, watching a day unfold, and got to thinking:

which is worse, back to basics, where kids are skilled and drilled, where scripted lessons ensure a scary homogeneity, where imagination and creativity are irrelevant? Or empty progressive pedagogy, where kids are given freedom to choose, projects to do, things to play with, but without any follow-up, such that they’re just messing around and not learning anything?

A few years ago I might’ve argued for the latter — choice and creativity trump scripts — but now I’m not so sure. Turning kids lose, even kids getting a ton of help from home, completely undermines what school should be about. And it sets up all sorts of problems for later — you’ve played but you haven’t learned — which will undermine your next academic experience from the beginning.

I like this editorial and I like this approach: let’s build a system so that in five years, every child will have a viable public option.

I particularly respect the honesty necessary to write this paragraph:

If faith and commitment had nothing to do with our Catholic-school choice, we still would have gone that way because, above all, we have no confidence in the district’s ability to deal with the kids that it must educate who would be negatively affecting our child’s learning.

“One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.”

Review of David Lipsky’s book here.

My check from mid-April has not been cashed by the city. It’s the end of May.

I called the Revenue office and they said they process the checks in the order in which they are received. They also indicated it might be a month, two months, or sometimes up to a year.

I don’t understand; in a city desperate for money they’re losing out on thousands of dollars in interest (if not more) because they can’t process checks efficiently. Surreal.

I liked this novel a lot; this passage, from a broken-hearted young woman who’s had just about the worst year imaginable, is perfect:

…A little girl with four women wondering after her, looking for her, sort of, without her ever knowing. That was love of the most useless kind, unless you believed in love’s power to waft in from a burning sky to the unseen grass it had designated as its beloved, unless you believed in the prayers of faraway nuns, unless you believed in miracles and magic, rapture and dice and Sufic chants and charms behind curtains and smoky, unfathomable distances.

I’m pretty sure that every education blogger will take a whack at this article and lay out some of the issues with this article. I got to thinking, though, about longevity. Fifteen years into the charter school movement, is there any evidence that schools without unions are producing “veteran” teachers, i.e., those who have taught for many years?

Whatever one thinks of teacher unions, they make it possible for people to build long careers. And while longevity doesn’t necessarily create effectiveness, it does allow for a kind of institutional wisdom that is lost when teaching staffs turn over every three years.

Who would sign on to teach in an inner-city system knowing that even if you broke yourself for ten years you could still lose your job?

So I’m a fan of Michiko Kakutani; whatever one makes of the reviews, they’re always written well and they almost always inspire you to read (who wouldn’t want to be that erudite?)

yesterday, though, I found myself using the dictionary after this phrase:

but new anecdotes and details add chiaroscuro to the picture.

new one on me; gradations on a print where only varieties of a single color can be used. Once I figure out how to say it, I’ll be working that into conversation…

So if you’re child insists on listening to a Justin B song, what do you play to ensure that it doesn’t become toxic?

This morning’s antidotes:

Sublime, What I got
Social Distortion, Ring of Fire
Public Enemy, Bring the Noise

I’m wondering if, as the pop songs get deeper under his skin, I’ll need to go deeper and into scarier music. Lil Wayne? Grindcore? To be determined…

So this school presents as the Holy Grail of urban education: a high poverty school with high test scores. And the article does a good job of explaining the focus on test preparation and the ways in which the school embraces the testing process.

Is it too much to ask, though, for a little follow-up with kids who went through the school — it seems pretty stable if the principal has been there since 1984 — to see if they’ve succeeded in middle school, in high school? Is the school working to ensure kids understand the concepts underneath the test questions, or is the school just engaging in empty test preparation, such that the kids flame out in middle school?

Wouldn’t be hard to find out.