US Americans, Your Education System

[stokedporcupine8]

[quote]jtrinsey wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:
Despite all this, there are people here who somehow think that letting our secondary education up to the free market is a good idea…

I’m not sure it’s as bad as you think.
[/quote]

Let me try and clarify. I think that privatizing secondary education to the point where the federal government is no longer involved at all and leaving curriculum standards up to the individual schools, or to the local communities or accreditation boards, is a terrible idea.

I do not think that giving people a choice as to where they want to send their children for secondary education is a bad idea. In fact, I think among many other things this would be a good step towards fixing our problems. Let me explain a little as I comment on the rest of your post.

The high school I went to is a Charter school that is nationally renowned. In terms of scholastic competitions, classes offered, test scores and college acceptances, there are not many schools comparable across the country. And although the school is distinctly middle-class, the student body was not of exceptional wealth or privilege. I would say the only distinctive thing about the student body was that it was something like 25-30% Asian… as you might expect a math/science school to be.

As I have been hinting throughout the thread, I think that more schools like this that specialize need to be established. The idea of having a “do-all, be-all” high school is a major problem.

There was no tuition, only a placement exam. There was only limited government funding I believe to maintain the building as it was converted from an old public high school. Most funding came from local business who sponsored the school. To be honest, our school wasn’t even really well funded; it wasn’t in a great (not bad, but not too far away from some not-so-desirable neighborhoods) part of town, the ceilings in the hallways leaked all the time and our track was just some dirt that went around a crappy football field. It wasn’t teacher pay either, Charter school teachers don’t even have to be accredited and are not union, if I recall correctly. Many of my teachers were retired engineers or scientists who didn’t have any formal teaching degree, but knowledge of the subject.

Ah, this is how it should be. As some have already mentioned in this thread, one doesn’t need a billizion dollars to run a school. I also think that just as in universities, secondary teachers should be people who work in their field, not people who specialize in “education”. I would feel much better about my future children learning mathematics or physics from someone who had a master’s degree in mathematics or physics then someone with a secondary education degree with a specialization in mathematics or physics.

Realistically speaking, the only real reason that my school was so high-achieving was simply because it took a ton of smart kids and put them in the same building. It created an atmosphere that fostered learning. The nerdy asian kid taking Calculus as a freshman now doesn’t get picked on (as much) but instead has four other freshman in the same class that he can relate to. The suburban white girl who is good at science doesn’t feel like she’ll be an outcast if she takes AP Physics, etc. etc.

Of course, and surprise surprise, this works really well.

The thing is, government-funded education is not concerned with higher-level achievement, they are focused purely on the median scores. My school is a perfect example now as legislation has been put into effect to remove the admissions test because pulling the “smart kids” away from other schools makes them look bad. So instead of being happy that a kid with a strong aptitude for mathematics is having the opportunity to take that skill as far as possible, legislators would rather see that kid get thrown in the low-achievement school to help bring the test scores up.

Here’s where I really wanted to comment. When I say that secondary education should not be privatized, I do not mean that we should stick with the status quo government-funded education. The problem is that right now government-funded really means government-run. Ultimately what I think is this. Our education must be egalitarian in the sense that lack of money doesn’t stop anyone from going to the “best” schools should they qualify to get in. Hence at least in some form government funding is needed to secure this sort of thing. Now, I also think there needs to be national curriculum standards. I don’t think these should take the form they currently do of some set of standardized test. Instead I think they need to take the form of higher accreditation standards.

In the end, I don’t think that government solutions work better for the low-achievement kids either. There is so much focus on “teaching to the test” that the lower-level kids don’t develop any interest in learning as they are never exposed to teaching methods that get them interested in learning anything. It is just, “cram stuff into their heads so they can pass the test and dump them on the next teacher.”

I agree.

[quote]
When you have a government-run solution, it tends to be fine for the median population but terrible at either end of the bell curve, which is exactly where the American education system is currently failing.[/quote]

The problem isn’t so much that any solution is government-run, but rather that both our society and government view education in the sort of one-dimensional way that leads to our missing the extremes. I think establishing different types of secondary schools would go a long way to fixing this sort of thing.