New York City seeking to reinvent schools
See this new report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education.
Eight years of New York City’s public school reforms have significantly but incrementally improved students’ performance and graduation rates. In order to bring about more dramatic progress, the district created a ‘radical’ new initiative through which schools fundamentally change their structures and employ cutting-edge technologies to support student needs.
Launched in 2010, the Innovation Zone—iZone for short—is an ambitious program that expects to produce upwards of 100 schools in the next three years. The iZone schools are being asked to “reinvent” themselves by fully individualizing student learning in order to achieve student mastery of subject material, not just “basic skill proficiency.”
Based on interviews and school visits in New York City, the report looks at the goals and challenges of the iZone initiative.
January 26, 2011 - 8:31pm
Individualized instruction must have a purpose for undertaking what can be an extremely difficult instructional approach for a single classroom teacher, even if the teacher is in a technologically rich environment. Hopefully that purpose is to intrinsically motivate students and their parents to become self-sustaining learners. Hopefully the use of the term 'individualized instruction' implies 'personalized instruction.' There is a significant and meaningful difference between the two. For this to work, and it can, will require a large initial investment in aligning instruction, with assessment, with evaluation, with curriculum, with standards, and the needs/strengths of the students involved. Good luck, this is a path to success, but it needs to be done right so that it succeeds. It would be a terrible injustice to take this important approach and do it badly and conclude that it is not a viable path to improving student achievement and educational success.
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