Blog damnit.

Oh, Blog. Am I an official participant of the future? So be it. Hello world!

The Annenberg Promise. Interesting, provocative read. Yet, very similar to anything and everything I have recently read concerning progressive measures in education. What we fail to do. What we do well. What we slowly but surely achieve. What we slowly but surely erode. What we still need to do. Invoking hope, peddling optimism. The "usual" rants and raves.

Although it does not generate some newfangled ethos, this article does broaden some of the things we should be doing as teachers. It got me thinking of Einstein's offering that "Insanity is doing the same things in the same ways while expecting different results." Are we just regurgitating progressive measures of teaching? Are we actually emulating the iconic education theorists we study? Why do we want to change... do we need a reason?

To view such a dynamic system requires alternate perspectives. This article has strength in numbers. I find it rewarding that the Annenberg Institute for School Reform has illuminated 5 key concepts, or "lenses," from which 8 different "senior fellows" perceive an opportunistic approach to public school reform. Agency, equity and justice, instruction and curriculum, outcomes and impacts, and urban conditions and context embody the focal point of some promising, tangible change. Outlined within are the ways in which we can reimagine urban schooling as reform's ground-zero: "...It can be argued that the hope for the future of US cities lies in the children who live and learn there." No longer does our culturally-devalued besmirchment need to be tangential. Urban schools can actually become the catalysts for change, and not necessarily the lost-cause environment of wayward educational despair.

But what do I personally know of this positive outlook on some famished educational system? My life has never really been threatened by any impossibly-heightened hurdles. I am just your average white suburbanite, void of any unbeatable struggle. I went to a good school, passed through the "required filters" (as Noam Chomsky would say), and exhibited some form of acceptable academic achievement... as one of my favorite Montclair professors Naomi Liebler used to say- "Not for nothin,' I learned stuff." What has happened here, and what often happens when I read alarming decrees of social injustice evident in schooling, is that I can't quite know until I am physically entrenched in the social stigma of urban education. I am on the outside looking in, when I need to be on the inside looking out. This article only continues to allow me to pass through the required filters, to view these problems from afar- as an almost external and expendible alien to change.

So how do these urban "challenges" affect suburban me? Half of me wants to combat these challenges. The other half? Well, I often refer to this half as experiencing "little old me" syndrome. If I want to take that indifferent action in life- accept that these issues don't have anything to do with me- then I am simply feeding the nasty flame. If I selfishly abandon my social responsibility, I no longer belong to the realities of this world. I grew up thinking that Newark and Paterson were some inaccessible, outworldly environments, and yet they are just as New Jersey as I am New Jersey. They are just as much my responsibility as they are to anyone actually living there. It's time for "little old me" to face urban environments as realities. Perhaps I have to break apart my cultural naivety and peddle hope in the way that the Annenberg clan does.