Mike Lach is one of the most dynamic reformers you'll ever meet, and has been working inside Chicago Public Schools for several years, helping to build its capacity around curriculum and instruction. Now he's set his sights on history and the rest of the social sciences. But he needs a hand. Here's how he states his problem:
I need to develop a K-12 social science plan for the Chicago Public Schools. I've decided that this is important because (1) social science is inherently worth knowing and (2) learning social science will help learning in other subjects (like reading).
I have the following constraints, that I suspect are true in most other districts.
- Metrics for success are hard to come by. We have no social science testing of any sort right now in Illinois, and I'm not sure that there are decent tests out there other than NAEP. Developing them will be expensive and complicated. Our kids are over tested probably, anyway.
- I don't have enough money to fund mathematics and reading, much less science and social studies. Any solution needs to developed cheaply.
- We're just taking baby-steps to think about our 600 schools as a portfolio of various options for various constituents. Creating some "global studies" focused schools is fine, but it's probably not a sufficient solution.
- There's lots of partners interested in this work (banks with their financial literacy programs, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, law departments who are running peer juries, local museums with community history stuff, etc.) who are well meaning but not very well coordinated. They have varying levels of capacity, but probably none are interested in running their own schools with this focus.
Might some sort of national alignment of resources or attention help solve this in ways that other initiatives haven't been able to? What's the pro-charter, pro-content and instruction, anti-establishment, pro-accountability solution to this situation?
Email me your suggestions ([email protected]) or post them as a comment below. Whoever suggests the most promising idea will win a free copy of David Whitman's latest book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. The deadline is noon on Friday.
