Learning, Innovation & Tech

Bombs & Breakthroughs

"Mr. Cellophane" Invisible Kids: In the middle of the achievement gap

CJ Westerberg, September 23, 2011 8:12 PM

cellophane-man.chicago.jpg

Image: movie: Chicago, John C. Reilly


"The truth is that achievement-gap mania has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. It has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform."
                                                       -  Frederick M. Hess,  AEI

Invisible, Inconsequential Me
Video Below

"Because you can look right through me,
walk right by me,
and never even know I'm there . . ."
- "Mr. Cellophane, Chicago Musical

by C.J. Westerberg

A must-read essay for the week-end where Hess weighs in on the costs on focusing on the achievement gap with Our Achievement Gap Mania, and  Dana Goldstein summarizes his post with some conclusions in her post here,  as to the price on this obsession on the talented and gifted, according to Hess. 

All one needs to do is read Paul Tough's cover story in The New York Times this past weekend, and it, yet again, illustrates a concept through two distinct eyes:  KIPP charter schools, which mainly serve urban disadvantaged youth where traits like self-control are rated, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, a privileged Riverdale private school in NYC, where kids spend weeks in France during vacation in middle school, where earning lessons of "grit" is of importance.

The Daily Riff asks, taking this a step further, what about the kids in the middle?  Is this majority not interesting enough to be covered by the press?

(Chicago Video Below)

Related:
Rishawn Biddle: School Reform isn't a Bloodless Excercise

  


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Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests - interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things or construction; and in artistic expression - we may say they are natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child..
John Dewey, The School and Society, 1900
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