To start, the "Teacher-led school innovates with student regrouping" felt like a very disjointed article that was trying to do too much at once. This could have easily been two separate articles. The school being teacher-led is not surprising considering the economic climate that our country is currently in. It comes as no surprise to me that schools are trying to cut down on the costs of running operations by having fewer people perform more duties. However, it kind of makes me think that the schools are ignoring the students that those teachers have to teach. The article mentioned that the new teacher/administrators have a lot of extra work to do on top of their teaching. It also mentions that the teachers have to take on a lot more students because of the class schedule system that they have put in place. In addition, what about those teachers who are interested in coaching students in sports. In addition to more administrative duties, more students, more meetings, how on earth would they be able to take all of that on? To me, it simply seems like they are trying to have the teachers take too much responsibility. Don't they have enough to do as it is? Yeah, money is probably tight, and more creative ways of getting the job done are necessary, but this doesn't seem like a viable long term option. I imagine that those teacher/administrators are going to get burned out at a much faster pace than they would if they were simply teaching.
It's funny because my first thought reading about the new scheduling system that the school put in place was "this sounds an awful lot like tracking" so I am very glad they at least addressed tracking in the article. One of the main things that people knock tracking for is the fact that students cannot readily get out of the track that they have been "assigned." This system seems to alleviate concerns that a child would get stuck in a single track, but it develops a whole new case of problems. The biggest one that comes to mind is attendance. How are teachers supposed to keep track of who is in their classrooms when there are kids coming and going on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis. It also seems like that would generate a whole lot of paper waste to confirm that such and such student is in this class this week and this class another week. It also brings to mind the issue of how their credits are measured and how many they should receive for doing such an amount in one aspect of a course and a different amount for another aspect. I don't necessarily think this is a terrible idea, but it just seems like, based on the limited amount of information provided by this article, that this system places a huge burden on teachers. I would hope that the students show a marked improvement, because, otherwise this system is probably not worth it.
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