GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The education blogosphere is abuzz this week with responses to Jay Mathews’ most recent Washington Post column, in which he issued a call for a term other than “paternalistic schools” to describe the wave of schools, mostly charters, featured in “Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism,” a new book out of the Fordham Institute. Mathews considers several terms — including “tough love schools,” “achievement-focus schools,” “high-intensity schools,” and “tough little schools” — but says none of them successfully conveys to parent and policymakers alike all of the schools’ characteristics. Other suggestions have popped up around the internet, from “relentless schools” to “elite charters.”

Over on her blog, Joanne Jacobs is toying with “total schooling,” suggesting that the term comprises both the academic and “values” approach these schools employ. I have to take issue with Jacobs’ nomenclature, because I’ve actually been thinking recently about the term as well, but in a somewhat different way: as an education counterpart to the notion of “total war.” Total war is a modern iteration of warfare in which one side marshals all of its resources, both military and civilian, to defeat the enemy. World War II is widely considered a total war, for example, because civilians contributed to the war effort and were considered legitimate targets for military action.

The theory translates imperfectly to the education world, of course, but in my mind, “total schools” would be those that marshal all of the resources of the community to defeat the “enemy” of low achievement. (more…)