Surprises
I’d say the biggest surprise is that we have a classmate (Jung Rhee) who has founded his own school. This is amazing to me. I cannot even fathom being able to fuse an educational vision and entrepreneurial mission in this way. I’d like to imagine myself doing something this ambitious, but I think very few are able to execute this type of undertaking. Fantastic.
Other surprises:
- Schools, on the whole, have been improving (Christensen), especially when considering the percentage of students who attend school as compared to the total population. If we look at the (NAEP) scores for math and reading since the early 1980s, the numbers show upward trends.
- While the U.S. has spent billions of dollars putting computers into schools, how students learn has changed very little.
Biggest Question
My biggest question, prompted by the above-mentioned surprises, is, “If schools continue to measurably improve, then how did we get to the point of near-constant negative rhetoric regarding American public education?” While standards will always shift to bear up new (and higher) expectations, when do the goal posts stop moving? Ever? Should they stop moving?
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