Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Waiting for Superman

The school that my son attends is a lottery based charter and as far as I know they didn't cherry pick anyone. Even though my son was admitted with special circumstances, he still had to be drawn in the lottery. The school agreed to work with me IF my son was drawn. Luckily the school was still mostly unknown when we applied.

The school was number one in the state in math, science and LA. This year with the lottery complete, there are 216 kids on the waiting list. It has a large minority population. New Mexico is 49th in education and there are few options for parents that can't afford to go private. I know how lucky we are to have found this school and even luckier that the school seems to be ideal for my son.

So interesting that this topic was brought up as I just saw "Waiting for Super Man" this past weekend. It has been on my mind since.

WFS does not say charter = good. In fact, they point out that fewer than half of charters are considered successful. What they do is talk a lot about drop-out factories. High Schools where for 15+ years fewer than 1/2 the students will graduate. They interviewed superintendents, teachers, parents who basically said if you go to that school, you won't go to college and probably won't graduate hs.

I felt the movie was trying to say, "This is America. Why would we fund and continue to run a school we know is failing children."

The big lottery scenes you see in the trailers were showing how desperate people were to get out of these terrible schools. They did complement some of the higher performing charter schools, but it seemed to me the real point is "why do we continue to fund poor teachers and poor schools at the cost of the kids."

WFS said multiple times, "we care more about adult concerns (i.e. people losing jobs from a school closing) than the future of these kids."

There were also several things said about how bad tracking is because the measures for tracking in many systems aren't valid measures versus a true fair method. And thus when kids get into the lower track, they can't escape it because they fall more and more behind. I think they were even saying there are GT kids on the lower track because of the biased entrance requirements.

This tracking part kind of tore at me a little because I'm someone whose child isn't getting what they need academically and is sitting in the high track. I can't imagine if there wasn't a track and he was getting less. But from a macro perspective I get what they are saying.

Anyway, the movie left me thinking. It made me feel fortunate because I have the ability and time to teach in the off hours. What about the poor kids who don't have someone.

Also, there were several moms who were trying to advocate for their kids and getting nowhere. For me, it was a reminder that it isn't just GT kids getting the shaft. There are really big problems here with the overall system.

There are some great public schools, but there are some really really bad ones too. That was the point of the film, many kid's futures are probably decided by some extent by the boundary lines for the district, which not only hurts many kids but also the health/future of our country.

I encourage you to see the film if you haven't already.

I believe this to be the heart of the problem. Great teachers, great schools + uninvolved parents, bad neighborhoods still = low success. The current educational system around here seems to combine the ideals of: slow down the pace of advantaged kids, give the disadvataged more time and school resources; give them the opprtunity to catch up. The problem is that this system still doesn't work. There are tons of "get involved" and "read to your kids" advertising in my county, lots community outreach programs, places to get free books, and several free pre-K and K preparation options, yet the ones who need it the most, don't take advantage of these resources.

My brother has 5 kids, he doesn't look in their backpacks or make them do their homework, because "it's the schools job to teach," not his. One of my nieces is gifted, he wasn't even going to allow the school to test her becuase he saw no reason. Luckily, the school convinced him otherwise, so my neice is now getting some enrichment at school. It makes me sad to know that there so many parents out there just like this. They never read to, play, or take their kids out to explore the world; even when it would cost them nothing but time. One year for Christmas, I gave my brother's family year passes to the local hands-on kids museum. They never took the kids once.

And so the cycle continues.

Wow, as disheartening as that is in general, that must feel even worse when it is in your own family!! That must be very difficult for you to see your nieces and nephews entering that cycle. Were your parents more like you or more like your brother?

Somewhere in the middle. We mostly lived with my dad in a low income neighborhood. He didn't really care about academics, school, or grades, as long as we weren't getting into trouble in school he was happy. He didn't read to us or try to give us a head start probably because he's not a good reader himself and he got by just fine. However, our dad, and eventually step-mom, always made time for us; took us camping, fishing, bike riding. My dad loved to play and get his hands dirty. He's a big kid himself, needless to say all the kids still love Grandpa!
I think my brother inherited his negative traits from my mother, with whom we didn't live, and by hanging out with wrong crowd in high school, he reinforced them.

Diane Ravitch has a skeptical piece on charters in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01ravitch.html
Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
May 31, 2011

I like this article. I would not classify it as a skeptical piece on charters.

It is a piece that is skeptical of: inflated results and claims of quick fixes.

This piece sounds like a call to look at the underlying problems to find solutions.

I was skeptical of her article. For example, she complained that even though more people graduated, test scores were very low.

Maybe, but how low were they last year and a few years before that?

She also said that the school didn't seem to have done a good job of preparing students for college.

Maybe, but who says everyone has to go to college to be successful, productive, or happy? And isn't she setting the bar kind of high here? A school won't go from most of the kids dropping out to most of them going to college in only a couple years, regardless of other changes. It's as though she was saying that if a failing school didn't go from failing to a model of upper-middle class values overnight, it was still not good enough. And that this is necessarily a good thing.

Along these lines...


I work in family/education research, and can tell you that there is a huge pay-off when we invest in birth to 3 education and intervention. It's expensive, though, so no one wants to do it. Still, it's much, much better to get these kids started off on the right foot than to try to fix it later. No one gets this or at least no one WANTS to get it.

Geoffrey Canada, whose programs have been incredibly successful with poor kids in Harlem, starts before birth. You can read ablout it here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/schoolhouse/archive/2008/09/12/the-zone.aspx

Well, sure, but so what? If my aunt was a man, she'd be my uncle. How is a description of an ideal world relevant to charter schools or the schools that she mentioned in her article?

Sure, I'd like it if all kids came from wonderful homes and the world was perfect. But it isn't, and the school system has to deal with that (just like the rest of the world does) and not blame families for the school system's own failings.