In my personal discussions with teachers and other parents, and my written interchange with people commenting on the DailyKOS version of my blog, I feel like a broken record stressing the need for many more “alternative” schools, so that our kids can have real educational choices. Discussing my seeming obsession with this “many paths” concept, my partner Sally suggested that maybe a lot of people have trouble conceiving of what a truly alternative school is. This then limits the discussion on how to transform our education system. I think she may be right, and there lies a big obstacle as I try again and again to make the argument for many educational paths. (more…)

In the Education Week March 19 article, “It’s the Classroom, Stupid: School Reform Where It Counts the Most”, author Kalman R. Hettleman is at least attempting to address the issue of governance that I highlighted in my piece yesterday on “Defining Governance”. Hettleman says…

The mismanagement of classroom instruction is the ugly secret and fatal flaw of school reform. Everyone knows that school systems are horrendously mismanaged. The media keep us fully informed and outraged at foul-ups like overspent budgets, computer glitches, bungled paperwork, defective maintenance, and unresponsive bureaucrats. But these failings, as serious as they are, tell only a small part of the story.

Though he does not use the “G-word”, I believe what he is addressing in his article speaks directly to school governance, specifically who is empowered to make school management decisions and what is the process for making those decisions. (more…)

I’ve been studying the overview of the new math standards proposed by the American Conference of Governors. I know there is a big push to get more kids prepared in K-12 school to enter academic programs in college toward careers in the hard sciences, but I don’t think requiring all kids to follow these guidelines is the right way to do it. Being more of a left-libertarian, particularly when it comes to education, I don’t like the idea of “high stakes” standards that require (rather than recommend) what you learn and when, backing it up with coercion and serious consequences (like failure to graduate) if you don’t. (more…)

Starting in third grade with learning the multiplication tables, our son Eric started having a problem with school. By seventh grade he would not do any homework, had been diagnosed with ADD, was taking Aderall, had been through an IEP, and had had a number of sessions with an educational therapist. When he got to the point in eighth grade of writing “F**k Math” on his standardized math test, we pulled him out of school. (more…)

Teacher magazine published the results of a survey of 40,090 K-12 teachers, possibly the largest national survey of teachers ever completed and including the opinions of teachers in every grade and every state. The survey, “Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s School,” was conducted by Harris Interactive and paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic Inc. You can download the full report at: www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/100646_ScholasticGates.pdf.

Here are some of the results I found most interesting… (more…)

I saw in the most recent Public Education Network “NewsBlast” that Part 1 of the “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher 2009: Collaborating for Student Success” has been published, this part focused on “Effective Teaching and Leadership”. It reminds me once again of the issues faced by our democratic system of governance and whether our public school systems promote or run counter to the ideals of democratic governance.

To set the context (and as I have said repeatedly in other posts) we are in a historic transition in the world and its institutions from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchical pecking orders to circles of equals. In a patriarchy, the governance model exists within a hierarchy of “superiors” and “inferiors”. At the top of that hierarchy are the people considered to be “leaders”, below them are the rest as “followers”. The “leaders” are charged with making the important decisions and exercising control over (and have responsibility for) all the “followers” below them. (more…)

I ran across a summary of a report from a Los Angeles based non-profit group called the Advancement Project (www.advancementproject.org/) on the Public Education Network (PEN) “NewsBlast” (for February 26, 2010) that comes out every several days. Their white paper is titled “Intertwined policies cause widespread alienation & worse” and can be viewed and or downloaded at www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu. (more…)

For her graduate school thesis, our friend Brenda opened an alternative charter school in the fall of 2000 which our daughter Emma attended for her three middle school years.   Emma’s mom worked as the school counselor for four years, the first two as an unpaid intern, the last two as a paid staff member, and also served for a time on the school’s Board of Directors.  The school was launched with about 120 students, offering kindergarten through sixth grade, which grew to include seventh and eighth by the third year.

As a person who believes that our education system is way too “One size fits all”, from the beginning I applauded this experiment to create a school on a different model than the conventional instructional school.  In fact, many people can’t even conceive that there could be any other sort of school than ones that focus on… (more…)

History confirms that our conventional instructional public schools were developed on an industrial model invented in the 19th Century, which seems pretty obvious to me when you think about all the structure in those schools of periods, bells, uniform classrooms, desks in rank and file, standardized curriculum, etc. At the end of the 19th Century, universal public K-12 education with no tuition, paid for by the taxpayer, had become such an expensive proposition that school district executives and school boards went to great lengths to attempt to employ the latest best practices from the business world to justify that all that money was being “efficiently” spent. It may in fact be worth considering if some of the business methodologies developed toward the end of the 20th Century might appropriately be applied to today’s conventional schools.

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I am concerned about the unfolding process of working out changes to our healthcare system, and particularly how it is being covered in the media as a contest with winners and losers rather than an exercise in compromise to find a working consensus. I think the framing of the debate in the coverage reflects a conventional wisdom that our political and legislative process is more akin to a spectator sport (where our political elite are alone on the playing field) rather than a societal effort to mitigate conflicting interests and find a compromise that can begin to improve the healthcare context for all of us. I for one, put a lot of blame on our education system.

My personal preference would be to treat healthcare basically as a public utility and adopt a single-payer system like they have in Canada, which I think would unleash the currently tamped-down entrepreneurial spirit in our country and liberate a great deal of pent up creative energy that could be directed toward starting more small businesses and reinvigorating our economy. Short of single-payer, some sort of government-run “public option” would be a step in that direction, and I imagine that fact is why so many conservatives and others vested in our for-profit medical establishment are fighting so fiercely against any sort of additional “toe in the door” alongside Medicare, the VA, and Medicaid. (more…)