Best Practices

Follow me for a second.

School districts talk all the time about best practices. They say we employ best practices as a district and we have our teachers employ best practices too. Simply put it just means to do what is best for students (if there is a better explanation I couldn’t find it).
Well Jacksonville routinely has two of the highest ranked schools in the country, Stanton and Paxon. If they are the best it stands to reason they are using the best, best practices. If we truly want things to improve in all our schools doesn’t it make sense to mimic what they are doing at all the schools?

Now we have arrived.

At those schools they don’t have to have universal board configurations and complicated two page lesson plans that are written mostly for the state visits. In fact they rarely get state visits because things are going so well. I think there a correlation between state visits and poor performing schools. The problem with correlations is they don’t determine causation and many teachers think things would improve if the state visited less.

The teachers at Paxon and Stanton are given wide latitude to reach their kids, something that has been taken away from the teacher at the typical neighborhood school, with their learning schedules, pacing guides, and focus calendars. If flexibility and creativity is working at Paxon and Stanton it stands to reason they would work at the neighborhood schools too.

There are a few other best practices that Paxon and Stanton use to that help put them over the top. They do not accept students who are not on grade level, in fact quite often their kids are well above grade level. Many of the kids at the neighborhood schools find themselves in the opposite position. Then at Paxon and Stanton if you do not maintain a 2.0 grade point average or if you are a behavior problem you are sent back to your neighborhood school. Neighborhood schools have no such luxury; they are required to attempt to educate whoever walks through their doors. That’s the neighborhood schools best practice.

The sad simple truth is that education has lost its way, it’s been hijacked by people who don’t know what they are doing. Those in charge most of whom have never been in a classroom and those who have did so long ago are attempting to fix the problems by throwing solutions like paint against a wall and hoping something sticks.
Word walls, complicated lesson plans, data driven instruction, RtI, universally board configurations, posted standards, the five Es, and a thousand other things are just this year’s fad. Fads don’t last but our problems will unless we come up with real solutions, unless we come up with some genuine best practices that are best for all.