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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (92978)	12/30/2004 2:56:06 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793895

I agree about the fragmented school day. I saw the California system come apart for my kids when they hit middle school and went to this system. What's wrong with American high schools? This short NPR clip npr.org tries at least to scratch the surface of this question via a quick interview with Theodore Sizer, former high school principal, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and author of The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education. Sizer comes down hard on two of the defining features of American public high schools: the unwieldy student:teacher ratio (usually around 25 or 30 to 1) and the absurdly fragmented school day, in which kids are shuffled from subject to subject and place to place every 50 minutes and in which, as a consequence, there is very little opportunity for focussed, concentrated work of any kind. Noting that the shape of the typical high school day has not changed much for the past century, Sizer suggests that it is not satisfaction with a solidly working system that has kept things so constant, but a debilitating fear of change.