Teacher's actual choices, when faced with toxic policy changes from on high, are: to walk away from the students and communities that need good educators (because the most capable have other options than being in classrooms), or to do the best they can within those 'guidelines' without being fired for insubordination.
Blaming teachers for the state of education makes just about as much sense as blaming doctors for failing to fix the medical system's runaway costs and inequities. Both groups of professionals largely hate what the modern pressures of their workplaces have done to the profession, by the way.
With all due respect, Edward, why "anything that wasn't public?"
Why not "life in a place where the public schools were higher quality?"
Why not "I wish my parents had made better life choices?" Let me be clear-- I'm not suggesting that your parents
had a lot of better choices in front of them, but this would have been a problem anyway.
Why was it that you weren't attending a magnet school? Such institutions have existed since the 1960's and 1970's.
Why is it about how awful the public schools were?
I was also publicly educated. I am EG. I could not have received a
better education given where I lived, at the time I was being educated, with my parents' somewhat limited options-- not at any other school option, save perhaps homeschooling (which my parents did consider). Even with nearly unlimited financial resources, my educational options would have been only
marginally better-- and the reason is that I attended very
good public schools. Which my parents
chose when they made decisions about where to live.
What isn't clear to me is why playing a zero sum game that allows
some children to 'win' while others simultaneously lose is a good idea. Why isn't it a higher priority to figure out how to fix this for
all children without taking anything away from some of them at the same time? Look at Finland again. The top PISA and TIMMS performers are-- surprise, surprise, mostly from
collectivist cultures, and those which have decided to get serious about addressing child poverty.
Linda McSpadden McNeill's op-ed about the absurdity of privatization(LMM is a professor at Rice U):
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/c...s-educational-marketplace-concept-absurdSuch an educational "marketplace" is absurd from the start. It is fundamentally undemocratic, turning our children into commodities and their parents into customers, not citizens. We know from our local shops and industries that companies enter and leave markets when it suits their bottom line. Their obligation is to their investors, not to their customers. Evidence from 25 years of charters shows "school" companies are no different. A charter chain may locate a school in a neighborhood, recruit and enroll the children it "chooses," then if the economics don't pan out or the school doesn't produce the advertised educational outcomes, that school may close, sometimes even mid-year.
Where do the children go? To the public school, of course, the school the community has established to educate all our children — a school now under-resourced because of the dollars that went to the charter or the voucher school, tax money that can't be recovered.
She's right about that part of her message. While I understand when individual parents
make a choice to avoid a local public school (we did it too), you are then at the mercy of those market forces, which is basically the equal of having made a bargain with the devil.
Again-- parents ALREADY have the choice. ANY parent
can homeschool-- from a legal standpoint, I mean. From a functional one, not so much, I know. But that is the same thing as saying that school vouchers and "choice"
can work as an option for everyone. No. They can't.
Maybe I am just not a fan of the notion that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, or that the best way to fix a problematic system is to drive it to failure and destroy it before rebuilding it along better lines. In the case of children, commoditizing human beings is just immoral, in my opinion-- the children thus harmed by this exercise will suffer literally irreparable harm in the process.
We've tried holding schools "accountable" for student performance-- and the only thing that has really emerged form all that data is what educators were saying in 1965, and have never really stopped saying-- that student performance is a great proxy mostly for SES.
