I am finishing my week of blogging with one of my favorite topics: innovation. We talk about it constantly, indeed, we worship at its alter. How many times have we heard (and said) that we will transform education through innovation?
Yet as a proud former “Senior Executive for New and Innovative Schools,” I can say on good authority that hardly anything we did in our “New and Innovative Schools” was really innovative. Granted, we did a lot of things that were much less dysfunctional than regular district schools. Principals got to hire their own teachers and were able to hire external candidates as well as internal ones. Almost every school had an extended year, extended day, or both. We had five single gender schools. We pushed very hard on parent engagement and asked parents to sign agreements acknowledging their responsibilities. Our high schools were small and all had strong themes that engaged students and were pervasive throughout the school, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (“STEM”), Science and Medicine, Architecture and Design, and Early College. Our charter schools included a KIPP-like middle school and a credit-recovery high school where students learned on-line in a supervised setting. We had some, mostly modest, grant support that could be used at the principals’ discretion to support student learning.