NYT letters to the editor
1) I don't recall any mainstream person saying this: "Rather than destroying the public-school system, as so-called conservatives have advocated,"2) This is exactly right:Researchers have shown that the shortage of qualified teachers has as much to do with retention as with recruitment. Too often, bright new teachers encounter schools with a toxic professional culture.
They find few opportunities to observe or collaborate with colleagues; they are assigned the largest classes, limiting chances to build meaningful relationships with students; and if they are given curriculum support, it is often scripted lessons, which undermine intellectual curiosity.
Charters offer the potential of a blank slate on which to build an environment that nurtures learning for teachers and students. When they do this right, they should be a lever of school reform.
It is not complete however: there also needs to be a system to evaluate teachers and reward the good ones and get rid of the ineffective ones.3) There's some truth in this comment:What trumps everything is parents who read to their children, discipline them, support their teachers, limit their television, mind their nutrition, keep them physically and mentally active, play games with them, buy them less and teach them more, take them to museums, exhibitions, playgrounds and fishing holes, help them with homework and show them what someone will pay you to do if you have no education.
Meddling with our schools is like trying to improve the government through campaign-finance reform. We are lacking citizenship, not rules.
As parents we look at the schools, unions, teachers or the government. When will we look in the mirror?
However, this smacks a little too much of the "blame-the-victim, let-the-schools-off-the-hook mentality that's all too common). Also, as the attached chapter from the great book Freakonomics shows, much of the common wisdom about the impact of parents and what they do (or don't do) is not supported by the evidence.4-6) Hear, hear!The second obliquely raises the question as to why promising practices in charter schools cannot be used in all schools.The third, perhaps most critical, is the federal government’s responsibility on insisting that impartial studies accompany every funded effort at school reform.
So far, school systems and Washington have consciously avoided such research because new initiatives may prove unsuccessful.
What we need is a “truth in advertising” component to report on school achievement, and to improve teacher training by requiring assessments that lead to progress based on mistakes as well as successes.
5) But what the editorial doesn’t show is the spirit that pervades these schools: staff, parents and students laughing and working together. The smell of new paint (and hopes) is everywhere, as are pictures of graduating classes, sometimes with only five children in them.The most elusive truth about charter schools cannot be captured by studies: perhaps the students who weigh down charter schools’ scores might have done worse or not even attended public schools.
Three cheers for charter schools’ spirit. But don’t review them quite yet; they’ve been running only a few years.
6) As most charter-school students are refugees from public-school systems that have served them poorly, I would need to know the relative changes in scores to draw any conclusions.As a product and proponent of public schools, I have found that the main problem is their inability to remove bad teachers or to reward good ones. Until this changes, public schools will still provide second-rate education at increasing costs to taxpayers.
The Charter Schools Experiment (6 Letters)
posted by Whitney Tilson at 12:26 PM
<< Home