Truck and Barter: The Difference a Word Makes

May 19, 2004

The Difference a Word Makes

By Ian

For those who aren't yet hip to the whole XML feed aggregation thing, I'd recommend getting yourself a copy of FeedDemon. Aside from the joy of consolidating numerous news feeds, it sometimes provides a perspective you might not get from surfing lots of sites.

Case in point, these two articles from USA Today that we situated next to each other on my screen:

Schools embrace innovation (USATODAY.com)

Struggling schools forgo innovation for familiar fare (USATODAY.com)

From the first article:

In addition, 49 states have developed new performance standards, and most are on their way to developing assessment systems, tougher definitions for teacher quality, a framework that will disclose more student-performance data than ever before and provisions for communities to hold their schools and policymakers accountable. How much more innovation can we ask public schools to undertake?

From the second:

While such creative solutions initiated by outside groups have raised students' academic achievement, superintendents and school boards tend to stick with familiar academic methods, even when they aren't working well.

There's a lot of information conveyed in that word, "struggling".

Is the distribution of "innovation" in schools correlated with those that are succeeding? The implication could be that new methods are available only to those who already find themselves in the upper half of the distribution. Then again, these are just newspaper stories. And the USA Today at that.

Posted at May 19, 2004 12:28 PM

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