“Run schools like businesses” is something we’ve heard for a long time.
Let charters compete with “traditional” public schools. Create voucher programs to challenge the district’s status quo. Make schools sink or swim based on the quality of their programs.
Fair enough. But let teachers engage in a little entrepreneurship of their own – say, by selling lesson plans they wrote themselves on the Internet – and some observers react like a sacrosanct boundary has been crossed.
“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” a New York University professor tells the New York Times. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”
Ultimately destructive to the profession? Sounds serious.
“Pssst, Buddy. Wanna buy a word puzzle?”
Personally, I’m not too worked up over this. But it does raise broader questions about just what we expect of teachers, as Claus von Zastrow writes in a blog titled “May the Best Teacher Win.”
Speaking of entrepreneurs, the Center for Public Education’s EDifier takes on the notion that if people like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all dropped out of college to form multi-billion dollar companies, why is a college education so vitally important?
“What makes this argument so dangerous,” writes Jim Hull, “is that it ignores the fact that many students don’t have the option of going onto college simply because they aren’t prepared to do so by their high school.”
Trust us: Dell, Gates, and Jobs were all well prepared to complete their schooling, if they so desired.
Finally, we mentioned running schools like businesses. How about running them like prisons? That’s what one commentator says is happening in an award-winning documentary called “The War on Kids.”
“It’s like we take our children and lock them up in a prison for 13 years of their life,” she says.
A little “over the top?” Alexander Russo thinks so, and I have to agree. Yes, zero tolerance policies have been carried too far, and some schools have gone overboard with security. But prisons? Having just watched the trailer, I can’t comment on the movie as a whole, but it seems to me that a more nuanced discussion of social conformity and the schools has been missed.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
