State Mandates As Political Cover. Today we’ll head straight to reader responses to Tuesday’s newsletter because they were so good and so important to ed reform writ large. This is exactly the kind of conversation I was hoping SCHOOLED would spur.
After praising phone bans, I asked:
Are phones so terrible that, like cigarettes, they should be treated as contraband in our schools? And prohibited at the state level? Is that also how you would treat, say, balanced literacy and three-queuing? What is the defining principle we should embrace so that we don’t try to micromanage everything from the state level but also encourage (or even require) schools to adopt evidence-based practices?
And boy did you have opinions!
Most tellingly, several respondents hit on the same theme: that local leaders often need the political cover of state mandates (or bans) in order to do the right thing.
Read the full post here.
