Dive Brief:

• In a new book titled "A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids," John Thompson, a veteran educator from Oklahoma, argues that struggling students need more connection, not more disruption.
• Thompson says that changes in federal policy are unlikely to rectify the situation at many low-performing schools, where decades of mismanagement and a lack of focus on individual students have dampened performance.
• Instead, he argues that an all-in approach, where school staffers focus on getting to know students, can help provide a nurturing environment for instruction.

Dive Insight:

Thompson, who came to teaching from a career as a historian and lobbyist, derides the constantly changing approach to instruction that Oklahoma schools took. He writes, “innovations that were designed to work wonders and that supposedly had no unintended consequences were continually announced, typically with the claim that the new policy was ‘research-based' … Typically, these were relatively cheap and easy gimmicks for complicated problems.”

In a review of the book for The Washington Post, Jay Matthews writes, “I have been watching D.C. schools for 44 years and have seen what Thompson describes many times.” Matthews says the new rewrite for No Child Left Behind is unlikely to change the future of many schools for the better anyway.

The renewed focus on state control hardly seems like a good thing to Thompson, who says the urban schools where he taught were often the “whipping boy” of the conservative state.

Several books from concerned former teachers have raised similar concerns, particularly around the quick pivot from one strategy to another. It’s a worthy concern, as one expert estimated that an initiative can take around five to seven years to work — longer than the tenure of the average principal and, according to Thompson, longer than most schools stick with one.