Small Schools Doubletalk
Small schools reform is often accompanied by familiar buzzwords that can mean different things to different people (sometimes called “stakeholders”). Here’s a short guide for wary beginners:
| Small Schools | ||
| Teacher-led, student-centered, community- connected school communities shaped by concerns for democracy, social justice, and racial equality. | or | Isolated subdivisions of a bureaucratically run system that erode the common ground on which a democratic system of public education depends. |
Choice | ||
| Providing diverse, high-quality school options to all children while promoting equity, democracy, and the common public interest. | or | Introducing market practices that privatize public institutions and reproduce inequality in the name of reform. |
Empowerment | ||
| Organizing efforts that make the exercise of power in schools transparent and shift it from above to below. | or | A conditional invitation extended by those in control to participate in “reform projects on their terms. |
Community Involvement | ||
| A commitment to power sharing and partnership in all aspects of school life and challenging dialogue among varied groups. | or | Obligatory and passive community presence at regularly scheduled official events, often in exchange for refreshments. |
Professional Development | ||
| Thoughtful school-based activity that encourages collaborative practices and shared experience inside schools and classrooms. | or | Externally designed, consultant-driven intervention that imposes pre-packaged agendas on school communities. |
Autonomy | ||
| School-based decisionmaking about issues of teaching and learning, staffing and resource priorities, and accountability and assessment practices. | or | The freedom to decide what to cut out of an inadequate budget. |
Standards | ||
| Meaningful objectives, developed and shared by a school community with the aim of ensuring that all students are educated well toward graduation and higher education. | or | A testing regime in which increased dropout rates and distorted teaching practices are the collateral damage. |
Data-Driven Reform | ||
| The use of relevant research by school communities to make informed, collaborative decisions about school change. | or | The selective use of data by administrators to justify policy decisions they would have made anyway. |
Neighborhood Schools/Community Control | ||
| A commitment to allow poor and working-class communities, particularly communities of color and rural communities, help design and shape the nature of their children’s education. | or | A chance for whites/elites to reclaim buildings in their neighborhood now “occupied by “other people’s children. A handy term to make racial segregation sound benign. |
