The Longest Reform
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If public schools are going to improve, they will do so because teachers partake of high-quality, career-long professional development. |
"It's like what they tell you in the airplane: You have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help the child. You can't save them before you've helped yourself." So said Lee Harris, a resident teacher who mentors colleagues from the Dade County, Fla., schools, taking the rare opportunity of a mini-sabbatical at the Dade Academy for the Teaching Arts. Ms. Harris' sense of the urgency of what she is doing is not exaggerated. If public schools are going to improve, they will do so because teachers partake of high-quality, career-long professional development that is directly relevant to the classes they teach. And public schools will not improve until and unless lifelong study can be built into the teaching job. This is work that must begin now and that will go on as long as there are children to teach and new knowledge in the world.
The major education reforms of the past 15 years have begun to address the need for a higher-quality education for all Americans, but none of them has yet reached beyond small, localized efforts. Each reform wave--from raising state graduation requirements and restructuring schools to establishing standards for the various subject areas--has been necessary. None, though, can truly bear fruit until and unless every one of the nation's 3 million teachers has had sustained opportunities to take an active part in learning how to bring them to life in the classroom. Whether we are asking every teacher to become a school manager, or a curriculum planner, or the deviser of authentic assessments, or to teach classes with a wide range of learning styles and to bring every one of the children to a high level of achievement, or to teach in a school whose children boast 60 different native languages, we are asking teachers to do something new and different from what the majority of them have been educated to do until now. And we expect them to do it in a system that was not designed to accommodate such work.
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