Sentence of the Day Using the Word "Counterdiscourse"

From Pauline Lipman's High Stakes Education (2004):

In the context of organized mass protests again racial segregation, school overcrowding, inequitable resources, school violence, and high dropout rates in Chicago from the 1960s through the 1980s:

In the present, when the status quo has become a new regime of truth, the
history of these social movements for school reform provides an important
counterdiscourse about schooling and social justice and about democratic
participation and activism in redefining social policy.

New Writing Course

One of my English teacher colleagues told me that she's interested in creating a new "remedial" writing course for seniors at our school. She's right in saying that there's a need for a senior writing course to build on the skills developed in the junior remedial course.

But our current junior and senior writing courses do not currently have clear curricula, nor is there vertical alignment between the existing junior and senior writing courses. The debate: add the class now because there is a significant immediate need, or wait until there is clear scope and sequence in place. The potential issue with immediate creation: the new class's curriculum will be set up in the best way that the teachers involved can do it (but without a clear sense of its place in a comprehensive plan for scope and sequence) and will begin calcifying, and will have to be partially or completely redone soon, when the scope and sequence is established.

Robert Hauser, in a recent paper criticizing high stakes testing, articulates a vision of what GOOD testing would be:

It is possible to imagine an educational system in which test-based
promotion standards are combined with effective diagnosis and remediation of
learning problems, yet past experience suggests that American school systems may
not have either the will or the means to enact such fair and effective
practices. Such a system would include well-designed and carefully
aligned curricular standards, performance standards, and assessments.
Teachers would be well trained to meet high standards in their classrooms, and
students would have ample notice of what they are expected to know and be able to
do.

Hauser's point is that this doesn't happen often -- if ever -- in the U.S., so we should be leery of high stakes tests. But he articulates clearly the utopia of a skills-based standards system. I think that if you were creating a class from scratch, you’d better be able to create "such a system" (in which teachers know their goals, kids have clear models, and the assessments build sequentially to help kids develop the specific skills) if you had those things in mind to begin with.