What can Mt. Lebanon learn from school superintendents in Connecticut?

Via the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, I learned that Connecticut's school superintendents (CAPSS) have put forth a controversial plan to reform their public school system. From the plan’s introduction:

The public school system is not meeting the expectation that all children will learn what they need to know ... to lead decent and productive lives. The major reason for this is that today’s public schools are not designed to enable universal student success. Instead, they are still based on the mid-19th-century expectation of supplying universal access.... CAPSS and its members are excited about the opportunity to help transform the public school system to ensure that it better meets the needs of children well into the 21st century.

Unlike many plans to “fix” public education that we hear about in Mt. Lebanon, this one seems different in two ways. First, its authors seem unafraid to go after real problems, even if solving those problems is likely to shake up the current public education system and its politically powerful beneficiaries. Second, the plan embraces some things that our local school leaders suggest we ought to fear.

School choice, for example. The Connecticut superintendents see choice not as something to be feared but as something essential to offering a better education. They want families within a school district to have more of it, not less:

Needed Action: Allow students and their parents to choose from a menu of options, including magnet schools, charter schools, and vocational-technical schools as well as different schedules and curriculums, all within the jurisdiction of the local district.

And they challenge a lot of other educational sacred cows, too. Here’s how they contrast the status quo with their proposed recommendations:

Note that final row. In Connecticut, they seem to understand that modern information and computing technologies are not just improving but transforming the ways that learning happens. In the 21st century, education is becoming less about moving students to and from a centralized learning factory and more about letting students learn anytime, anywhere. (And, if you think a fancy new high school is an important part of meeting the challenges of our educational tomorrow, read the report. Bricks and mortar are hardly mentioned.)

If you’re at all interested in public education, the full report is worth reading. It’s certainly got its flaws – among them the apparent need to engage readers with contrived student vignettes and an over-abundance of warm-and-fuzzy photographs – but overall it’s a refreshingly honest look at the problems with public education in many of our United States.

And it offers one more thing: a sign that there are some people in public education who are willing to tackle those problems head on. In Connecticut, at least.