which is itself astroturf for reforming.
Comment:
WellAppointedDandy
10 October 2010 10:57AM
I was a mathematics teacher at a charter school in inner-city Brooklyn in 2004-2006, just as that movement was really starting to gain speed (for example Bill Gates had recently donated a huge amount of money to start such schools.)
This article discusses none of the disadvantages, that I can see. The idea of charter schools usually emphasizes "small schools," where there is more personal contact with students. This is a reasonable idea, but in reality it meant that we had no resources; in the entire school there were 4 teachers (it was for a single grade level), no guidance counselor, no sports. I was a new teacher and had very little mentoring, which certainly hurt the experience for me and the students. The only after-school activities were the ones we tried to do ourselves (I taught chess when I had time); as a new teacher I found it very difficult to find time to do such things, and in fact I remember becoming very upset one time when a student wanted me to help him with his Mock Trial work (I had studied some law), and I simply had no time and energy for it due to my other responsibilities; after he left the room I literally cried because I knew we were failing our students. There were no tutors available, no translators or foreign-language classes for immigrants, and there was only so much 4 teachers could do, considering we had full-time classroom duties. In fact, when I wrote the administration asking for occasional Spanish-speaking help, I was reprimanded.
The school was called "FDNY," Fire Department New York, and thus was a huge political football in the post-9/11 environment. We were constantly in the news (charter schools have been in the news for ages). The head of our "region" (a position way above principal, in charge of dozens of schools) was always coming by to give press conferences, but never even spoke to me, one of the only teachers; not once did she speak to me. Related to this point: everyone talks about incompetent teachers, but in reality the principals and administrators are often just as incompetent, in fact more so. Oh yeah, and while a bunch of journalists came by to interview the principal, I was also never spoken to by a journalist.
One excellent thing about this article is the mention of other social services: these are VITAL to success. Many of my student's parents were illiterate, for example; I knew they were illiterate because they couldn't read the teacher's names and room numbers when they came for parent-teacher conferences. If you wanted to help the student, you often had to start at the parent. Also, you NEED alternatives for the students. You need afternoon programs, night programs, summer programs, FUN stuff for them to do. You needed to feed them good food and give them something to do with their lives other than wander broken streets and watch TV. You need a culture that fosters learning, otherwise teachers (and even students) will have real trouble improving a school.
There was a study done around that time which made pretty big waves with teachers; it stated that the primary indicator of a child's educational success had relatively little to do with money spent on the school, etc. The primary indicator was "how many books are in the household where the child lives."
erikus
10 October 2010 1:48AM
All of this union bashing may make for good politics, but it misses the point. Perhaps we should begin by noting that many of the children in these under-performing (read inner city schools in neighbourhoods that have been blighted by fifty plus years of ghetto-ization) schools don't have family support, their parents simply don't care: fathers are in jail, parents and guardians on drugs etc. etc. Back when I was a lad, if I fell behind in my studies or misbehaved it was a simple matter: the teacher or headmaster would ring up my parents and they'd be damned sure to straighten me out. But who do the teachers call when the parents aren't there or don't care? What can they, in the end do? Do the reformers have any solutions to this. No. Does Guggenheim document these poor children in his movie? No.
Instead they all choose to avoid this difficult question all together contenting themselves instead with proposing gimmicks like charter schools. Charter schools are examples of success they say. Of course they are, because the parents or guardians have to enroll the children in them, which means that they are almost exclusively populated by the children of parents who care! Where then does this leave the children of absentee parents? Herded into the same awful schools that have been now denuded of students whose parents would be more likely to be involved in the life of the school, abandoned by politicians and philanthropists who choose to devoted their time, money and efforts to glamourous high profile projects like the charter schools. What then becomes of these 'lost' children, if you will, abandoned now by not only their parents but by their neighbours and a government under the hypnotic trance of these 'school reformers'.
The schools themselves are gripped by conditions that even Charles Dickens would have a hard time grasping: gang & drug violence on school premises, numerous gun crimes (we are talking about the United States of course), security lock-downs on a fairly regular basis. None of this of course is very conducive to education.
<snip>
But the school reformers, obsessed as they are with standardised test scores, choose instead to beat them over the head and turn them into convenient scapegoats, and when they, through their unions, resist this bullying, all the better for the reformers. Now they have a big juicy target in the unions being the consummate politicians that they are they immediately jump at the opportunity and start blaming everything, including the failures of their own policies on, you guessed it, the unions.
<snip>
Bolding mine. All of the rubbish about the lottery being as indifferent as random selection from the public is laid bare in that one sentence. The lottery is done from a pool of parents who are already a distinct group of self-selected people. No one begrudges the children their caring parents, of course, but it keeps being over-looked (deliberately?)that a self-selected pool like this skews the results so the statistics gathered about charter schools are utterly meaningless.
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