Happy New Year!

Yesterday I introduced readers of this Weblog to Bob Peterson, a teacher from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who organized a team of educators to develop the website: Social Studies Resources.  Bob Peterson is a veteran teacher, who with a group of Milwaukee-area teachers envisioned education in their own classroom being improved, and through their work help shape reform in the public schools of the USA.  Their group, beginning 19 years ago, started with real problems at the local level such as issues related to basal readers, standardized testing, and the textbook dominated curriculum.  They created Rethinking Schools, a small nonprofit organization that publishes a quarterly journal, books, and supports a very powerful website. 

Rethinking Schools is an organization that supports a framework of education that is underscored by our discussion here of humanistic education.  Although there are differences, what appeals to me about Rethinking Schools is that it is a grassroots organization that is working within schools by teachers with students and parents.  Rethinking Schools takes on the issues that mainstream educational organizations tend to ignore, such as racism, social and environmental justice, critical history, the selective omission of certain parts of American history in basal readers and school textbooks.  Although much of the work of the group has been focused on social studies education, the same can be said of the way science textbooks have been written in this country.  

Rethinking Schools, in my opinion, makes a powerful claim that our schools need to change, and that this change needs to be further invigorated at local levels by classroom teachers who are inspired by colleagues from other local communities to make change in their own school systems.  There are more than 15,000 school districts in the USA, and yet, the conventional wisdom is to implement a one-size-fits-all approach by tethering local school curriculum and pedagogy to a national program called No Child Left Behind.  The idea simply makes little sense given the diversity of American society and shear number of individual school districts in the country.  

What are some of your ideas?  Do you agree that with such diversity we need to seek other ways to organize the curriculum and pedagogy in our schools?  What are some ideas that you can glean from the Rethinking Schools website for your own community?