Well, it's been a while. For that I apologize. However, given the calamitous nature of this past year's political skullduggery, I should be afforded a modicum of lenience.I've been doing a lot of hoping lately. In fact, I've been diligently practicing what Herb Kohl (one of my top three education heroes) describes as The Discipline of Hope. For hope is indeed a discipline - not in the conformist, rather negative sense of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, but rather in the sense that discipline yields liberation. The discipline of hope directs one's perspicacity towards the attainment of some desirable happenstance. For me, that happenstance has been freeing our nation's youth from the punitive, oppressive - and decided political - talons of NCLB.
A few years ago I was attending the Building Learning Communities conference on a sweltering July afternoon in Boston. Founded by my friend Alan November (another of my top three education heroes), BLC brings together some of the most progressive minds in education from across the globe to revel at the edge of educational possibilities. On this particular day, the keynote address was given by Professor Andy Hargreaves the "Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College." (Andy must have very long business card.)
Andy said that from his perspective (ostensibly from the Thomas More Brennan Chair) "America is the last English-speaking country to attempt to colonize the sinking sands of standardization." Every other nation which had previously wielded standardization as a political bludgeon had failed to achieve any lasting improvements in student learning. In a free society, he said, standardization was utterly unsustainable as a social, educational, or political tool. "A new era is coming," he said, "The era of post-standardization. And we had better get ready."
Last November 4th, on an usually balmy night, I witnessed the most sweeping political change in my lifetime standing among the ecstatic swells of other hopefuls in Chicago's Grant Park. Could the election of "Team Obama" be the harbinger of this new era? "We'll see," said the Zen Master.
We'll see indeed.
