Look to the Rookies for Students' Needs

Kudos to Jay Mathews for drawing attention to the massive stupidity of bureaucracies -- and how some educational innovators are fighting back:

it is at least as important to focus on how we use each minute of the current standard school day -- six and a half precious hours. This is the view of people like Dippel, who as an educational consultant has told her loudspeaker story many times. Thousands of teachers across the country like Dippel are gathering the courage to say "I needed that time to teach" when scolded for disabling or ignoring the most irritating administrative distractions.

Mayor Fenty, I suspect, knows this. He has been talking to some of the teachers who are taking a stand against wasting time. But there is little about this in any of his public statements or published plans. It is very possible that in the flush of their political victories, the mayor's new team will inadvertently reinforce the old idea that flowcharts and spread sheets are what is important, and that classroom brilliance will naturally follow if they just make sure the RIGHT people use those loudspeakers.

It would be nice to hear these important people say that the best administrators are the ones we never hear about, the ones who do most of their work in classrooms rather than at press conferences, and who might actually help their teachers remove those loudspeakers so their students would have more time for Harper Lee and quadratic equations and the life of Martin Luther King Jr..

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Look to the Rookies for Students' Needs

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; 12:16 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030600429_pf.html

If D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and other big city leaders want to know what is missing from their plans to remake their schools, they might ask Colleen Dippel why she popped open a ceiling tile and cut the wires to her classroom loudspeaker while trying to teach low-income Houston fifth-graders 10 years ago.

She didn't tell anyone what she had done. When asked why she had not responded to some broadcast instruction, she looked puzzled and said her loudspeaker seemed to be broken. It was an urban school, so no one bothered to fix it. She used the extra bits of uninterrupted learning time to focus on math word problems and reading novels and several other techniques that captured her students' interest, and raised their achievement levels significantly.