Rigor And Relevance, Not Frills And Fads Make Better Schools

Don Gaetz - January 2, 2006 - Gulf1

Don Gaetz is Superintendent of Okaloosa County Schools (Florida)

This past week brought no little satisfaction to parents, students and educators in Okaloosa Schools. They learned that, for the third year in a row, Okaloosa achieved the highest rating on the state’s comprehensive assessment of academic performance.

It’s been pretty hard to keep the smiles off our faces.

First in math, first in reading, first in science, and tied with our close colleagues and neighbors in Santa Rosa County (for first) in writing.

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“What we did in Okaloosa Schools,” I repeated, “is to clear out the underbrush of educational fashions and learning fads that have cluttered our schools, muddled our teaching, and disserved our children for too long.”

This is another in the recent group of articles that explains how common sense is returning to some school systems, and the educrats are being shown that the "new way" non-sense they have been touting mostly doesn't work. We have known for thousands of years how to teach. Aristotle created the concept of the Lyceum 2500 years ago. The basic concepts have worked to teach a huge number of topics to billions of people. People have not changed.

Why do educrats think that the process of teaching can be re-invented and then reject the vastly lower results that they are getting from students as not related to the changes they have made? When can we get accountability for the incompetent results rather than the hopes of these educrats that their new system will be better?

This is an excellent article that explains one way to return our schools to sanity, by going back to what works.