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Investing in Writing to Win the Ed Race

By Mary Tedrow

Classroom teachers are generally last in line when it comes to spending decisions and the first blamed when those dollars don’t result in student achievement. Given this history, it’s not likely that I’ll be asked to serve on a committee writing a grant for the “Race to the Top” money to be distributed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan this fall. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion on the matter.

Duncan says these grant dollars will flow only to states promising innovation. For most policymakers that means grand schemes—charter schools, fancy hardware, giant reading programs with discrete benchmarks, alternative paths to teaching, textbook adoptions, mountains of data and tests, tests, tests.

My idea of innovation calls for a quieter revolution, one with fewer bells and whistles. It begins by envisioning a quiet but humming classroom, where busy heads bend over pads of paper and hands scribble rapidly...