I read the briefs and walked away with the chorus from Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" echoing in my mind - "There is something happening here, but you don't know what it is, now do you Mr. Jones?" The heart of the matter is these reforms are happening in real time an no one is exactly sure what impact they are having or will have on education. At least writers were honest.

The authors did break the perceived reforms into five strands or streams. (I was surprised that they did not identify a sixth alluding to the impact of technology in education.) The strand that struck me as most salient was that of professional development. It is a dilemma that most school districts wrestle with. In the past year I was involved in a professional development experience that I felt was both poorly conceived and executed. A group of thirty-five teachers were assembled in a classroom and lectured to for half-day periods that were separated by several months. Though we were assured at the outset that we would be involved, in the interest of presenting material they contracted to cover the presenters never acted on this. We were passive participants being taught specific technical skills with out any effective means of analyzing or discussing the skills we were encouraged to practice in the classroom. Of course the presenters were academics and it was apparent they had not deployed these skills themselves but were merely summarizing research.

To my mind identifying real practitioners who brought contemporary experiences to the professional development experience and who to the time to develop truly interactive presentations. The authors identify this as a problem. To enable what I felt would have been a better professional development experience the district would have to identify the practitioners, release them to develop the in-service, and create more time to allow for interactive experiences. The school calendar only provided so many days for inservice and to exceed that would mean the district would have to absorb considerable cost. In the end, as the authors described, it was easier for the administration to purchased "canned" professional development, heavily researched based, that was an easier sell to a Board of Education. In the end Professional Development remains the path of least resistance for local policy makers, often being amongst the first line items to get the axe.

Is it any wonder that more and more teachers are turning to professional organizations (i.e. unions) or professional curricular organizations such as NCTE, etc? These organizations are composed largely of practitioners. From the very outset they offer a sense of authentic advice and counsel. They have long associated themselves with the movement of professionalizing teaching through meaningful intellectual inquiry with a keen eye on what really works in the classroom.

Lastly I think there is a new paradigm of community interaction within the schools. That is the corporate. I have been involved with just such a project. The corporate entity (in this case Cisco Systems) developed the curriculum, the teacher training, and a model for deploying the curriculum uniformly worldwide. There standards are rigorous for both students and instructors. The professional development is continuous and ongoing. The proposition is simple: meet or exceed our standards or we will decertify the program. It is a quid pro quo exchange with local institutions as well: We (Cisco) give you at low cost high quality curriculum that leads to direct student employment. You the local institution give us students to create a well educated workforce in the IT industry. I think within certain curricula the corporate model has some potential to greatly enhance school reform. On the other hand, some basic curricula such as American Government ought never to be a curriculum influenced by a corporate entity. (Though as a teacher of many years I can't help wondering how much influence corporate entities like McDougal/Littel and Macmillan have on the curriculum via the omni-present textbook.)

Ah, yes, Sparks and Hirsch visit our old friend, constructivism. The notion that we construct our worldviews from assembled knowledge and learning rather than simply merely receiving it from others is a central point of conflict in the 20th century. Be it Nazi Germany or other totalitarian states trying to control the information flow of their citizenry or the much used theme of constructivism in literature, the idea of people constructing their own view points abounds. Remember Winston Smith, the central character of Orwell's 1984, trying to construct and individual reality in one where Big Brother's reality is the only one allowed? THX1138, George Lucas's first film, shows a similar character valiantly struggling to create his own world view in an even more repressive society. So powerful are these messages that one feels that constructivism is an innate part of the human intellectual landscape.

Indeed, it may well be, but what of education? Evidence suggests that William Shakespeare received an education amounting to what we call "rote learning". That is he memorized large sections of the Bible, Roman Poets and other pieces of the day's literature. He took that learning and constructed a body of work that endures in the highest stature some 400 years later. Of course one could argue that Shakespeare was "gifted." The current trend towards constructivism argues that we are all gifted if given time and mentoring to reflect upon our learning. This may well be the case. However, the central dilemma of constructivism is who doles out the information in an educational setting and how it is doled out. Think about it. If you had never heard of constructivism itself, you would still have to have read about it from Sparks and Hirsh in this readin?. Presumably you would then incorporate it into your worldview. The dilemma of constructivism in education is how much of a known worldview do we set up for students before asking them to construct their own (as if they aren't going to anyway)? Do I present the chemical elements and ask students to devise their own periodic tables? That's silly, as the periodic table is one of the basic tools of chemistry. So where does a teacher stop "telling" students and allowing them construct their own ideas to form their own ideas? The fact remains that someone is going to have to fill you in on what is known and what isn't. How we do that is the crux of the issue.

Sparks and Hirsh go on to make excellent recommendations for improving staff development. They get no argument from me - only skepticism. In a time when basic educational infrastructure is crumbling with out the funds for repair, am I supposed to think that any serious effort at educational reform with respect to professional development will take place (outside of academic discourse)? I think not. Otis Blackwell may have said it best, "Money, honey". I see no evidence of meaningful funding for reforms in professional development now or on the horizon. If anything professional development is being cut back in favor of adding ever growing numbers of educational programs.

I have no qualms with engaged learning. The concept of interdisciplinary studies should be fostered and encouraged. Project based learning is great. All of these are practical and desirable ways to encourage a wide variety of learning modalities. However, the picture presented in the King School article struck me as trendy pap. It was as if these extremely time consuming ways to educate (and expensive) are the only ways to learn. Nonsense! The nuns I had were demanding. Yes, much of my education in the early years was seatwork. But, I feel none the worse for it. I remember the work sheets. You did the first part in class and saved the more difficult last part for homework. And they checked the homework. It was your responsibility to do the homework. Not your parents, not your friends, but yours. If you didn't do it Sister might invade your personal space in and unfriendly way. The nuns had some basic goals with regards to education. They wanted you to read, write (with spelling), and master mathematics through basic algebraic concepts. What you did with those skills later was your business. And every opportunity they emphasized responsibility to yourself (with school work), the community, the family, and being a parochial education, your church. They used every motivator in there arsenal from lavish praise to humiliation. (I thought then, as now, that they could have done just as well without the humiliation - but it was a different time.) There education was though clear, focused, and direct. You knew why you were in school and what you had to do there. That was forty years ago. Times were different and societies expectations were different. Am I suggesting that we go back to the way it used to be? Not in the least. As said in the opening of this reflection the totality of engaged learning should be embraced. Let's not through out the baby with the bath water though. We decry seatwork, but think of the enduring skills you might have attained; playing a musical instrument or mastering an athletic skill. Do we call it seatwork when musical students practice the scales to distraction? Do we call it seatwork when football players hit the tacking dummies till exhaustion sets in? No. We call it learning by practice. It's called work. Either you do it or you have little likelihood of mastering the skill. Seatwork has a place. It reinforces skills essential to grasping larger and more complex concepts later. There needs to be a balance between the rigors of learning as work and the joy of learning as purely engaged activity. In the article about King school I missed that integration.

Man o' live do these articles make school governance sound good. On the whole I'm in favor school governance as described in the articles. Who wouldn't be? I taught the first half of my career under a principal from the old school. It was top down management and you did it his way or he made your life miserable. That just won't do in these times though. But there are times these days that I long for someone to make a decision so I can just get on with the business of teaching. The story on many (not all by any means) building committees is they are usually held after school and invariably occur on difficult day in the classroom. Your tired and you want to go home but you know it's the right thing to go to the meeting, so you do. The agenda has everything from eliminating tracking to concerns about teacher parking (parking, which you have debated for six months with no meaningful decision in sight). Any questions to administrators are then deferred until they check with the district office (i.e. the lawyers). There are several colleagues on the committee who have their own agendas to put forth and belabor ad nauseum. The community members don't have a clue what you are talking about half the time so the issues have to reiterate in detail for their benefit. The union steward has to help filter out the most hair brained of proposals lest the contract be violated. When a decision is made, in our case by consensus which means that any sitting member can veto an item by refusing to agree, it really lacks any teeth unless it was an item put forth or solidly supported by the administration - which kind of makes me wonder why we go through the entire process anyway. The reality of self-governance is that it is a messy endeavor. Many different stakeholders are involved and making decisions that impact everyone are difficult. Little time is really spent on discussing underlying educational issues precisely because there is so little time.