Yakkin’ about Yakima

What would we ed bloggers do without good-spirited comment wars? It's really the dessert following the fruit of our labors. And wouldn’t you know that Karin Chenoweth’s Seattle P-I article, which we posted on last week, has caused quite a stir over at Ed Sector’s Eduwonk?

Many good points have been made about the article’s depiction of Granger High School’s work narrowing the achievement gap—Chenoweth neglected to mention specifically the success of Navigation 101 at the school, possibly implied a “one-size-fits-all” model for school turnaround—and Chenoweth even responded to several of the comments personally (she only had 900 words for crying out loud!).

I particularly liked this slice of Chenoweth's rebuttal:

"In the schools I profile, every adult acts as if his or her role is important–because it is. I think we have to get away from the idea that individual teachers, teaching on their own, can save public education. They can’t. It is impossible for any individual teacher to know everything about teaching every topic to every child. It is only with the collective effort of entire schools and even districts and states that we are going to get the job of educating every child done. I don’t pretend to have figured out every piece of that–I don’t think anyone has–but the people in the schools I profile have important insights into how to make public education work. We ignore those insights at our peril."

People, this is the essence of Webducation 2.0. Proceed accordingly.