Teachers and Parents On Ice - Who Knew

I haven't checked in on Mr. Dorn for a few days and this morning I found an interesting article Sherman Dorn: "Cooling the mark out -- an explanation".

I must admit that it took me a while to make sense of what he was talking about. But when I finally got the concept in his explanation of "The "Cooling-Out" Function in Higher Education", I started thinking about how this concept could apply to K-12 school systems with teachers and parents.

I have written about the Delphi Technique and those who were attuned to the Alafia debacle saw first hand how those dynamics played out. The combination of many teachers that were speaking out along with the strategies used by the parents changed the usual course of events in how the system controls those types of situations.

For example, see if you can see how these strategies may have been playing out with the "cooling" of students and teachers in HCPS:

"Clark argued that there were several traits of an institution with a cooling-out repertoire: alternative definitions of achievement, incremental rejection, use of a paper record to persuade the mark, the existence of "agents of consolation" (academic advisors), and the dissolution of hard-and-fast standards."