Mission High Quotes

“To implement these changes, the school initially followed a more typical, top-down strategy of reform: the state sent in a consultant to implement changes. “It was an outsider who came in and talked about the civil rights movement and did touchy feely group discussions,” Guthertz recalls. “Someone else came in and for one day taught behavior management strategies that focused on controlling and penalizing students versus making changes in teaching practices that would engage and support them. That blew up at the school. The administration got rid of that program.” The issues that come with this kind of approach to school reform—“do what the district, state, or consultants say”—have been a recurring theme in the long careers of Guthertz, Roth, and McKamey. “It comes off as an attempt to hijack the effort by the teachers to think about education,” McKamey comments. “It’s the deepest disrespect. The teacher has been teaching for ten years and someone is going to come in and say, ‘I’m going to show you something.’ Most of these people have never taught in the classroom.”
― Kristina Rizga, Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

“Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and one of our country’s preeminent testing researchers, has found that assessments and tasks designed and scored by skilled teachers, such as essays, science projects, research assignments, and presentations, are far more effective than standardized tests at promoting learning and diagnosing how students are doing.”
― Kristina Rizga, Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

“The latest research by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists tells us that achievement tests can’t measure important social and emotional skills either, such as Maria’s growing confidence in her intellect, the courage to speak up in class and defend her views, the tenacity to keep rewriting her papers and work on her weaknesses, the social skills to form new relationships and to ask for help, and the resilience to come to school every day even when deportation notices arrive.15”
― Kristina Rizga, Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

“it’s easier for a journalist to embed with the army than to go behind the scenes at a public school. Schools are a home to minors, after all, and the degree of protection is greater than in most other public institutions. It took months to find a school that would let me be a fly on the wall.”
― Kristina Rizga, Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph