The bear was cute - but at an appropriate distance. I thought he/she might try to climb through our window. I came across another one outside about 20 feet away from me - we were both startled.
Charter schools don't necessarily do better than public schooling, but if they fail they go away. Charter or private schools don't have to be religious. My kids went to a non-religious private school because our local, suburban public school was terrible. Interesting that the private school had a much more diverse student body than the public school.
I don't have answers - but I know the problems are complicated and go beyond the quality and dedication of the teachers, especially in poorer neighborhoods.
I agree. And to be clear, I'm not against charter schools. There are some very good ones, and they can cater to students who have specific needs or interests. However, there are also some very good neighborhood schools of the traditional public persuasion. I'm against the idea that charter schools (or a move to supply vouchers to private schools) are a panacea for all that ails public education. And as an educator (though at the college level) who has some teachers in my family, I know that teachers, and teacher's unions, aren't the primary problem either. One problem I have with some of our local charter schools is that they are non union, and this means teachers are always looking over their shoulders, worried about test scores year to year, and actually afraid to experiment to see what works for them and their classes. And collegiality goes out the window when teachers see themselves as being in competition with their colleagues. Also, no one has their back if they're treated poorly by administrators.
Sadly, the US has a couple of issues that many other western democracies don't share to the same extent, so trying to lift an educational model from a country with excellent public school outcomes won't necessarily work either.
1. We are a very economically stratified society with a larger gap between the wealthiest and the poorest citizens. As a rule, the richest of the rich kids are sent to private schools, but upper middle class people tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods with high property values, so their local schools tend to be better funded, to attract more experienced teachers, and to be populated by kids with educated parents.
2. As a whole, Americans don't value education. Oh, we say we do, but that's always followed with "so kids can learn job skills and we have a better, more nimble work force." We don't think education, knowledge and learning are valuable
for their own sake, or are needed to be better citizens. At best, we think they're luxuries for those of the upper middle class to indulge in or that science is "too hard" for most people to understand, so why bother. At worst, we're overtly anti intellectual and regard science and other areas of basic knowledge with suspicion.
Note that some groups in the US have done very well and have outperformed other groups in terms of educational attainment, because they
do value education and intellectualism to a greater extent.
I've been frustrated by how poor the reading comprehension skills of many of my students are and at their ability to apply basic algebra (or even grade-school level math, such as the calculation of percentages) to their coursework. Seriously, I encounter students who don't even know how to convert a decimal to a percentage. This is in spite of them being products of "outcome focused" education and standardized testing that was supposed to focus exclusively on reading comprehension and basic math skills. I suspect it's because the teaching of these skills without integration into other subject areas fosters memorization, not application of knowledge. Also, many of them grow up in families where no one reads for fun and where they don't learn how to use math in their daily lives (they just memorize a bunch of formulas and are taught to use them in narrow, specific ways for testing). There was less time (and money) available to teach kids about History and science and the arts in school too.
I don't blame teachers for this, though. They were overwhelmingly against "No Child" and other such programs and warned that this would happen.
I'm not looking forward to what four years of what will clearly be an anti-intellectual and anti-taxation and anti-public education administration will do to us.
