Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
I am a firm believer in "choice" in schools. I feel it was written into our constitution and that George Bush claim to be the "education president" was unconstitutional. 4 of the framers of the constitution were very intimately involved in education and different views on what is an effective method. As a result I feel the point that since they did not ascribe or enumerate the supervision of education to the federal government that therefore it is given to the states. Just because a state has "choice" does not preclude a small state like Rhode Island working together with Mass. in order to get an economy of scale. At the same time Texas can take a different path from California from NY. But as a result of the "No child left behind" which should be understood as "no child will get ahead" the federal government took State money and decided who to reward and who to penalize based on a very simple formula based on a few exams.
Since I lived in Asia for years and saw the influence of national exams there I was one of the first to realize which way the US was headed. Like it or not we are part of world economy in which every school is compared on one or two test scores. I have no issue with this, I feel if you are not happy with measuring the students based on one or two test scores then fix the test or diversify your schools.
I home schooled my kids for years -- that is choice.
And one of my sons went to a charter school for five years. That is where I got the inside view of charter schools. My first impression was of how orderly and well regulated the school was, how hard the teachers worked, and how impressive the hallway displays of student work was. But then I was a little miffed that the PE department consisted of the kids walking around the block when it wasn't raining. There was no art or drama. The total focus was on the English test and Math test. Everything else was secondary. I became alarmed when I saw them fire about one third of the teachers one summer because they had tried to unionize. During the five years my son was there we went through a principal every year and the last two years they didn't have a principal, they had a business manager (a woman without any education background).
After the Second grade exam scores came back showing that my son was reading below grade level and likewise with his math I decided to take over. They sent him home with lots and lots of worksheets. We ignored those, I had him read a book every week. By the end of 5th grade he was reading a grade above his grade. None of that should be credited to the school. My son is Special Ed and every single year they tried to get him out of the school because on a per student basis he is much less profitable to the profit oriented business running the charter. One summer they actually transferred him out saying that we must not have gotten the invitation to the meeting.
At my son's 5th grade graduation ceremony they sang a song that my son could perform on the violin (he had played the song on national HS competition with my HS students). His teachers didn't even know this. Had they known this the performance would have been a lot better with him accompanying them. This was only one example of how stunning it was how little the teachers knew about the students. A few months earlier I had sat in a meeting with his teacher and realized she was really clueless that he was a level 4 reader, perhaps the only one in the school.
Also, when you look closer at the bulletin boards in the hallway, which you naturally do when you are waiting to talk to the teacher on Parent teacher night, you realize that the book reports are nothing but cut and paste operations from Wikipedia. As a teacher you become tuned to words that are "off key" for an elementary school kid.
In my opinion charter schools are not the results of educators trying to take radical approaches that public schools aren't ready for. Perhaps KIPP was, but the vast majority are simply accountants using tricks to turn the $10,000 per student into an income stream and make their owners a profit. They do that by paying teachers less, making them work longer, and making the discussion tightly focused on two test scores. Nothing else matters. They don't have new or more efficient techniques, rather the secret to their success is to deemphasize or even eliminate everything else you would expect to take place in a school, and then to eliminate any students who don't help their bottom line or test results. If you look at them as a whole they don't do better than Public schools as a whole. If you look at the top 10% of them (a very dangerous statistical approach) then yes, they do better than the average Public school, but they don't do better than the top 10% of public schools.
Yes, the question is "choice" but the choice isn't different educational theories like that of Benjamin Franklin vs. Thomas Jefferson, no the choice is between education for the sake of society, or education for the sake of making a profit.
Maybe I have become jaded but in my opinion the No Child Left Behind initiative was designed with several things in mind. First, let's emphasize and grade schools based on a couple of test scores (as I have said, unlike many educators I realize that we will be forced to take this road), Second highlight "failing schools" and put this on the front page. Third, create a "three legged" race for schools making it close to impossible for them to compete with charter schools who are not regulated by this (this point is much more complicated for someone to understand, if you are interested I'll explain it, but will spare you the details lest you aren't).
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