Bright Futures

It's interesting to see how schools go about reforming themselves. This is a pretty lengthy and detailed fleshing out of the middle school's most problematic practices, and every issue was tackled head-on. I can't begin to imagine how long it took all of the faculty to do the research and compile these guidelines, but it is clear that there was a great deal of thought put into the document. All the same, I think that while the sheer volume of research and planning holds a lot of water, it came across as a little bit romanticized. Knox is pretty much aligning itself eye-to-eye with NCLB's standards. That's not at all a bad thing, of course. NCLB's 12 core standards are very ambitious and they address problem areas that need to be addressed, but aside from the usual 6 steps of "phasing out" in every rationale, I don't think that the school explained exactly how they were going to implement their new standards--of course, if I just overlooked that part, that might be an indication that they need a little bit more attention to the particulars of school-wide application. Also, describing ideal scenarios in every rationale for pages does a good job of painting a mental picture for the aspiring school reform hopeful, but at the end of the day it accomplishes little in the field of practical application.