Dive Brief:
- Ted Kolderie, who helped write a 1991 law that created charter schools in Minnesota, says in his new book, “The Split Screen Strategy: Innovation and Improvement," a key problem with public education today is stifled innovation.
- Kolderie says centralization brings standardization, which plagues traditional public school bureaucracies as well as large charter management organizations.
- NPR reports the book advocates a split screen strategy — one that allows innovators to move ahead at their own pace, while allowing people who are uncomfortable with innovation to continue gradually improving the traditional system while innovation slowly spreads.
Dive Insight:
An important element of the school reform movement is the sense of urgency to solve a problem. Waiting, people argue, means an entire cohort of students loses the opportunity to have a better third grade, which they’ll never have the chance to try again. Even a well-intentioned sense of this urgency has advocated a centralization of policy that takes control of classrooms away from teachers. Charters schools, which were designed to innovate, have been replicated into networks in a way that necessarily stops their freedom to do so.
Teachers, in turn, have suffered from low morale. A recent study found close to half of public school teachers do not feel heard in school-level decision-making, contributing to low levels of job satisfaction and leading a lot of them to look for new jobs. High teacher turnover is not good for schools. Leaders in both the traditional public and charter school sectors must consider the conditions under which they are asking their teachers to work.