Fundamental change at the instructional core
Elmore (1996) analyses two major education reform movements that took place in the United States in the twentieth century: the progressive movement and the large-scale curriculum development projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation. He argues that neither of these reform movements worked because they didn’t change fundamental patterns at the core of schooling, which he describes as follows:
By “the core of educational practice”, I mean how teachers understand the nature of knowledge and the student’s role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork. The “core” also includes structural arrangements of schools, such as the physical layout of classrooms, student grouping practices, teachers’ responsibilities for groups of students, and relations among teachers in their work with students, as well as processes for assessing student learning and communicating it to students, teachers, parents, administrators, and other interested parties.
Elmore, 1996, page 8
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