US public schools can do better
Post-pandemic, Harvard researcher Martin West states, “We’ve had the greatest decline in student achievement in US history. We have to have strategies to address this.” 1980’s national school change leader Ted Sizer commented, “School reform is like moving a graveyard.”
In Renegade Teacher: Inside School Walls with Standards and the Test, former urban school teacher Dr. Katherine Scheidler shows how schools can better serve all students, at any time.
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Scheidler moved from the classroom to the epicenter of school change with the dreaded accountability as Assistant Superintendent of teaching and learning in varied Massachusetts school districts. Scheidler illustrates the challenges and victories of standards and testing of all students, and she points out how school must still change to better support those classroom heroes who work every day with children.
Dr. Katherine Scheidler earned degrees from The American University School of International Service in Washington, DC, Brown University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the School of Education, Boston University. She taught for over twenty-five years at an urban school adjacent to Brown in Providence, RI, and concurrently served for eight years as Brown clinical professor teaching Methods of Teaching. As Massachusetts school district leader, she helped guide the first wave of new state standards and tests initiated in the Reagan presidency and first implemented in the Clinton era of new accountability legislation and through George W. Bush’s ambitious and much-reviled No Child Left Behind era, followed by the Obama administration’s less stringent approach to standards and testing. She now supports teachers in online courses.
