(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Go read this Rick Hess post. Like right now! “Ed Reform, I’d like to introduce you to 1990s Ed School. Oh- so….you two are already acquainted?”
Another Rick once noted “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
“Another Rick” FTW
That groupthink of which Hess speaks I believe is the crux of our ability to improve student learning outcomes, and is the Gorilla in the room no one acknowledges much less is willing to shoot: ed-school trained teachers are fundamentally ill-equipped to improve student learning.
21 years ago through today all I hear from ed-schoolers is indeed ‘multiple intelligences,’ ‘scaffolding,’ ‘differentiation.’ In our urban areas (DC, LA, Detroit, Chicago, et. al.) that has done nothing for Black and Brown children. Blaming ‘poverty’ is nothing new, just louder today. If we spend the next 21 years trying to fix poverty through the classroom we’ll have another generation teachers ill-equipped to educate Black and Brown children, and be no better off than we are now.