RE: Ch 5

From: Phillip Capper (phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz)
Date: Sun Jun 17 2001 - 14:01:29 PDT


I am extraordinarily stimulated by Bill's posting and the responses to it.
There is so much in there for us to think about.

I have two immediate comments. I think that the parallel thread on Chicago
school reform speaks to the point about the economic structure of
schooluing in America. What is being described in that thread is the
implosion of the latest rpound of chicago school reform. But I was working
in chicago when the previous round was destroyed in favour of the current
round. Using Bill's model I would suggest that the collapse of the
democratic 1990-94 reform model (local school councils) was engineered
precisely because it challenged the economic structures through something
which at least had the potential to be truly democratic.

My other comment concerns Bill's contention that:

"thefocus is primarily on cognitive skills, and an approach thus defined
never
comes to fully challenge the culture of schooling, and instead propagates
the
deep technocratic-meritocratic structures that energize it. Furthermore, the
methodology being blind to the ecology and economy of schooling,".

That is not our experience. We find that the use of the DWR methodology can
(but does not always) make visible the underlying structures of which Bill
speaks. What it cannot do - at least at the level of the individual
institution - is create a strategy for changing it. So why bother? Because,
I would suggest, an awareness of those systemic level contradictions may
create a springboard for doing 'the best we can under the circumstances,'
amongst the actors within the school. On the question of whether or not we
'propogate' those deep level structures, I must now reflect more on our own
work.

Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand

Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395



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