As a University of Chicago scholar, Tony Bryk repeatedly produced local research of national importance. He combined skills in experimental design with incisive insight.
Three years ago Tony Bryk moved from observer and instructor to initiator and innovator. As president the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Tony is doing applied research across networks his team created.
The big idea is networked improvement communities learning how to improve. Carnegie is conducting a unique brand of "Improvement Research that allows us to cull and synthesize the best of what we know from scholarship and practice, rapidly develop and test prospective improvements, deploy what we learn about what works in schools and classrooms, and add to our knowledge to continuously improve the performance of the system."
Quantway is a community college network that seeks to reverse high failure rates in math. Eight community colleges in eight states are building accelerated pathways that will "motivate and engage students with an innovative quantitative literacy focus in which students use mathematics and numerical reasoning to make sense of the world around them."
Tony and team keep asking the networks, "What does good look like and how does one go about getting good?"
The Building a Teaching Effectiveness Network is a Gates Foundation sponsored partnership with the AFT. It includes Baltimore, Austin, and New Visions for Public Schools in New York City. The network partners focus on developing and retaining effective teachers.
Both networks get at the problems of practice by encouraging root cause analysis, changing mindsets, and developing common tools. The Foundation encourages development and refinement of good ideas "tried very quickly." They help their network partners see systems rather than discrete problems. They help colleges and schools develop quick improvement cycles around pictures of what good looks like.
Check out Tony's books: "Trust in Schools," and his most recent book, "Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago."
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Non-compliant lower class children are in a state of permanent social class warfare with the middle-class institution of the school which imposes compliance, submission and obedience upon them. They know that school offers nothing. The curriculum is junk. The days are long and boring. The entire projects is aimed at the successful 75% or is it 60%? The bottom 25% or is it 40% are waste product and they know it.
There is a very tired notion that success can be replicated from areas of cultural compliance to areas where class warfare is taking place. It cannot. If you wish to subscribe to these fantasies by dressing them in academic tech clothes, then go for it. It should keep the wolf from the door. there is always money sloshing around for tech solutions to class warfare.
And it is so much more rewarding than getting real, and addressing the reality of a society in the process of disintegration.
The schools in lower class areas must be democratized. Compliance is dead. It is sprayed on a million walls and shouted in a million songs and tattooed on a million arms and still you do not get it.
Go cut your lawn.