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Small Schools Doubletalk

Illustration: Henrik Drescher

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.orIsolated 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.orIntroducing 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.orA 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.orObligatory 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.orExternally 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.orThe 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.orA 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.orThe 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.orA 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.

Included in:

Volume 19, No.4

Summer 2005

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