Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews makes a startling claim: great teaching, not buildings, make great schools.
Ok, it’s not that startling. JLF has been saying that for years.
Anyway, I did get a kick out of this passage from the WaPo article:
Consider, for a moment, a contrary example, a school system that did all it could to make its facilities as good as any child could want. Under a school-improvement plan in the 1980s and 1990s, Kansas City, Mo., built 15 additional schools, with such amenities as an Olympic-size swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability. It didn’t work. Even with student-teacher ratios as low as 12 to 1, there was not enough of the demanding, energetic teaching that changes schools, and Kansas City’s poor academic performance continued.
