I N THE long history of formal education, schooling has rarely been personalized. It would be easy to compile a long list of famous individuals from the past who have been expelled from schools for their purported inability to learn. It is interesting to speculate whether such notably creative people as Charles Darwin, Patrick Henry, James Russell Lowell, Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Sir Walter Scott, and Daniel Webster were actually advantaged by being pushed out of the schools of their time. In more recent years, Madame Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, and Marlon Brando shared their fate. But a truly personalized school would be able to recognize such budding genius. Indeed, it would be able to diagnose and support the whole range of human talents. A personalized school is one in which each individual person, whether student or teacher, matters a great deal and has a program that is good for him or her.
ENNETH Sirotnik and John Goodlad caution us to think in terms of school "renewal" rather than "reform." Sirotnik tells us that reform is usually preoccupied with accountability rather than evaluation. Much high-stakes reform, for example, is aimed at rewarding or punishing schools and educators. Renewal, on the other hand, urges a new accountability that is more akin to "responsibility." 1 Goodlad points out: The language of reform carries with it the traditional connotations of things gone wrong that need to be corrected, as with delinquent boys or girls incarcerated in reform schools. This language is not uplifting. It says little or nothing about the nature of education, the self, or the human community.. .. School renewal is a much different game.. .. The language and the ethos of renewal have to do with the people in and around schools improving their practice and developing the collaborative mechanisms necessary to better their schools. 2 Renewal is concerned primarily with what Seymour Sarason has called "creating new settings" that reflect critical inquiry about educational practice. Renewal is all about how a learner's growth in knowledge and self-awareness leads to wisdom, personal happiness, and collective responsibility. But only a minority of schools achieve
A model of the school environment that encompasses a range of factors essential to improvement is described here by three of NASSP's five-member Task Force on Effective School Climate. They conclude by presenting their agenda for the immediate future.
Any given school environment represents the interplay of school cultural values; the curricular, organizational, and human resources of the school; and student productivity, all seen through the lens of student, teacher, and parent perceptions of the school's climate. The environment of the school is not the actual cultural norms and expectations as lived and experienced but also the perception of that reality by the "significant others" of the school—student, teacher, and parent/community. The perception, in fact, is often more significant than the reality, since people act and react as they perceive something to be.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.