Ed, I could not agree with you more on your comments and prescription below. Charter schools should be part of the menu but are no more the single savior for public education than vouchers. Until we overcome the brainwashed thinking that education is a slave to the economic principle of the bottom line, we will underfund schools, continue to decrease the innovative curriculums and fail to attract and retain dedicated teachers who can survive the myopic attacks on them instead of systemic failure, administrators who can do their jobs without being full time fundraisers.
However, the most critical component that drives but is missing here from parents/voters is the will to do more than complain. We have let brainwashing about good business practices become the primary mantra for educating children rather than adapting good curriculums of the past with better curriculums of the present, always keeping an eye on the changing needs of the future. By emphasizing testing as the Gold Standard for what it means to be educated, we reduce teachers to being line supervisors at the manufacturing plant producing workers for tomorrow. No wonder so many burn out and leave. My teacher's bones are highly pessimistic about making good changes within the next generation if families continue to be maxed out in time, opportunity and willpower. As long as two income parents can't deliver their part of the equation to educating their children, why the heck do we scorn teachers? As long as popular culture and economics demands that consumerism is the main priority of our society, we will be trapped and suffocating. I was not born a rebel, far from it. I do not subscribe to radical notions. But I am increasingly convinced that the poor health of our schools, the near terminal nature of health care delivery systems, and the corporate elitism in our political circles will accelerate what already may be inevitable decline. It's not quite this simple, but the haves vs have-nots drive many sociopolitical cycles in history and we don't seem to be paying attention to ours. I have blamed religious fundamentalists for many current problems in the American institutional system. People trying to impose their worldview on everyone else is always a prescription for disaster. But political and economic purists who subscribed to "less is more" and NIMBY have changed the immediate landscape. That's why activists are increasing outside the system. The Thatcherites and Reaganites who brainwashed a generation into thinking government was bad all the time have succeeded far too well: it took 9/11 for people to see what public servants, including the uniformed military, did for them on a daily basis. What Education and Health 9/11 will it take for the public to understand that there is more at stake here than property taxes, school funding, teacher salaries, and not having enough dedicated people to do the job? In Oregon, we may actually be witnessing the death of public schools by underfunding. If emergency Measure 28 enacting temporary tax increases does not pass in January, state agencies and the schools face increasingly dire outcomes, the equivalent of forced suicide, including losing much of the state highway patrol and closing 7 prisons. Think about it. The school year is already the shortest in the nation, the Portland School District has just cut spring sports programs (Music and Art were decimated long ago), including the very popular Outdoor School, which many Oregonians credit with turning them on to Science when they were in Junior High. PSD has $44 M shortfall now. Not even an increase in the percentage of lottery funds and donations from wealthy Blazer players can overcome the money problem. With the recession and dramatically shrinking state revenues, next year's shortfall is estimated to be $55 M. Their teachers are okay with cuts in pay, but not benefits. (The state retirement system has been undercut by Enron, Wall Street and poor planning - in that order. Enron and Wall Street exposed the weak planning.) If the shortened school year is deemed legally unfit, graduating seniors will face difficulty getting into college, and now for some of them, no sports scholarships to help get them there. Some school districts cannot afford to perform mandated testing, further jeopardizing students. With tuition rising, high unemployment, you're probably not surprised that an alarmed business community is reacting to what they see as a likely Brain Drain, much as California experienced after Prop. 13 tax-reforms decimated school funding there in the 80s. Even though it is encouraging to see local school boards, parents and teachers in active revolt trying to do something smart and creative, I am not optimistic that a generation of brainwashing can be undone in time to save the patient. Because I don't believe there is a One Size Fits All prescription I also don't' think there is a miracle worker who can perform a Lazarus - it's going to take painful adjustments and hard work, but I fear it will get worse before it gets any better. - Karen ED WROTE: Karen, I have very mixed feelings about charter schools and about the amount. of experimentation that goes on in education. My daughter attended primary school (Kindergarten to Grade 6) at one of Ottawa's half dozen or so "alternative" schools. These schools were based on the concept of "child centred learning", an approach which was strongly promoted by the 1968 Hall-Dennis Report to the Government of Ontario. It's a very long time since I've looked at Hall-Dennis, but one of its basic ideas was that children should be the agents of their own learning and the role of the teacher was to assist them in doing so. In other words, you don't sit kids in rows of desks and talk at them, you sit them around little tables and help them think and figure things out by stimulating their curiosity. It's a great idea, but what happened at our school is illustrative of some of the perils of implementing it. The school saw itself as not only serving children, but families, and parents were expected to be involved in helping roles in the classroom and in setting school policy and direction. The problem was that many parents, both husband and wife, worked and could not make it to the school very often during the day. Parents who did not work, mothers mainly, spent a lot of time at the school because it provided them with something important to do. Cliques developed, with the non-working parents tending to shut out those who worked. As an example, the inmost and topmost clique did not invite my wife, who worked but was on school council, to a dinner with the new principal. That not only hurt, it caused a lot of bad feeling between the in-parents and the out-parents. The moral of the story: let the educators run the schools and very firmly nail down what roles parents can play at the school. I don't know if the parents involved in charter schools would behave like our alternative school parents, but I rather suspect they would if given the chance. At our alternative school you not only had to deal with cliques, you had to deal with a lot of very strong but ill-qualified opinions on what should be taught, how it should be taught, the role of the teacher, etc. >From the foregoing, you will have gotten a sense of what my prescription for education would be. Fund the schools adequately and let the professionals run them. Keep them neutral and protect them from particular causes. Safeguard the kids from being co-opted by someone's existing or defunct ideology and from excessive experimentation. Let parents in, but in carefully established roles. In summary, concentrate on running good, well-funded, inclusive public schools that turn out thinking and compassionate kids. ----- Original Message ----- Good commentary below with some contrarian statements. What do you think? Also check out this PBS REPORT on reform in Philadelphia schools, where the problem of slighting professional development works against reforms, or in colloquial terms, doing half the job, or "bassakwards". (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec02/rescue_mission_12-11-1. html) Attack of 'The Blob: Why are teachers unions and school boards trying to kill charter schools? By Jonathan Alter NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE @ http://www.msnbc.com/news/840765.asp Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002
