27 May Supposed problems with small learning communities.

1. “They can’t be scaled up”. Some people in the educational establishment eventually recognise the overwhelming evidence that small learning communities or similar maybe can work. However, they claim the problem is that they can’t be scaled up. The assumption is that scaling means going from a small setting, which may be a learning community, learning centre or small school or whatever, to a typical large school is not possible. Therefore the whole movement is fundamentally doomed as it can’t cater for the needs of large numbers of children. Let’s look at an example of real-life scaling. When Howard Schultz found that the...