I just had an hour-long interview with a guy in our office, M, who works on (awards) TIF grants (Teacher Incentive Fund). So invigorating! One thing he said that rings SO TRUE of the education scene here in NOLA is, “It’s a complicated landscape”!! If there's one thing I've learned this week, it's that. I'll probably be expanding this concept into my SEF (Southern Education Foundation) homework editorial response, which is due next Friday. So this blog entry is my seed. If there's something about writing that I know for sure, it's: "Don't let your seeds get away from you! Baby them! Nurture them! Feed them! Track them!" (But I have a terrible history as a seed-neglector. That's why I haven't written a YA book yet, among other reasons.)
But back to M's astute, marvelously concise, wonderfully true comment. Indeed, if NOLA were just any other city, if it were a 'normal' city (ie, without its histories of natural disasters, its Southern particularities, its schools system's historically 'dire straights' status), I would only be becomeing acquainted with a regular ole' central office this week, as my first week on board at this internship. Instead, what we have in NOLA is a tangled mix of collaborations, ties between organizations: service providers and funders, granters and grantees, weak and strong schools, direct-run and charter schools. What results is a web of inter-organizational alliances that form a very complex eduational landscape here. Perhaps we can nick-name this city's innovative, unique, up-and-coming, transforming, transitioning school district "the Spaghetti School District." SSD. Spaghetti meant in no connotatively-charged way-- I can't say that a complicated landscape is messy, just because its structure is less bending than the traditional, centralized school district model is. Perhaps spaghetti is necessary for reform; solid structures won't permit it. SDS is a rough draft, rather than a bound book-- which again, is not meant connotatively either positively or negatively. Rough drafts we think of as gestational, incomplete, directionless -- but also consider, they are ripe with potentialities, and the hope for the future product/outcome is intense (fear too). A bound book can be thought of as stable, an accomplishment in publishing, but also consider: it gets outdated (by the two-year mark, tops, for an academic's book to be on people's radar before it is retired to the dusty shelves, I heard on prof [or was it my dad?] once say).
Spaghetti and Rough Drafts. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment