It’s Not Over Yet

Are we irrelevant?

I’ve been pondering this question a great deal lately.  I look around at what currently falls under the heading “Education Reform” and I don’t recognize the logic.  The test-is-best meme, built upon the supposition that scores = learning, bound up in the glaring”let’s just not talk about poverty” decision…

I once accidentally walked into the men’s room in a restaurant.  The disconcerting, “Huh?  This isn’t where I expected to be” experience resonates in exactly the same way.  I’ve somehow stumbled into a parallel universe.  I’ve gone down the rabbit hole.  I could probably go further with that string of metaphors, but you get the idea.

It’s all a bad dream. Right?  I’ll wake up tomorrow and schools will be filled with empowered teachers spending each precious instructional moment utilizing pedagogy selected because it was the right fit for the kids in the room, not because someone 1,000 miles away decided that it was a good fit for some statistically-normed  group of students built on a totally theoretical plane.

Right?

So, like my 21st Century peeps, I looked to the interweb tubes to help me find what I’m looking form. My twitter feed helps some- with links to this piece on how to make sure that the learner is doing the learning or this one about shifting the power dynamic in classrooms so that kids are more empowered.  I start to imagine that established voices like Deborah Meier and Alfie Kohn just don’t resonate anymore, but then I hear new voices at the table, like Sam Chastain, and Dan Callahan and I think…maybe it’s not over yet.  I look at FaceBook, at the organizations I follow there, and I see groups like the QED Foundation, and Edutopia and I think, maybe.

Then I look around at my colleagues at AUNE, working tirelessly to help new and experienced teachers find new and better ways to reach their students and I know.

Yeah. It’s not over yet.

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