private schools, expensive utopias
I've had to accept that we are going to be debt-addled middle class parents because we've decided that we are going to pay a great deal of our income so that Leo can go to a fantastic two room school house school on campus -- whose grounds take us back in time to a rougher around the edges Orange County (dusty orange groves and my own photoshopped in tumbleweeds abound). The Farm School consists of green barns, the only ones left on Irvine campus. Everything else is earth-tone.
The teacher-student ratio is like one to ten instead of one to thirty six. Leo can learn at his own pace, become a genius or fall behind his peers without creating a huge scandal.
Proposition 209 or whatever it was destroyed public education in California I'm told.
I wanted him to go to public schools -- but I would be sending him to the test -- the very forms of aptitude evaluation that I have blogged about here that I found totally bogus in the course of my research on the Progressive Era and American education reform.
So de facto, we are opting for the private route to Utopia. I remember my fantastic Nixon-hating, ecologically-minded, brilliant, liberal public school teachers in Mt. Vernon with regret and chagrin. They taught me everything good I know about learning and the world they taught me to hope for is simply not going to come to be, not in California at any rate.
The teacher-student ratio is like one to ten instead of one to thirty six. Leo can learn at his own pace, become a genius or fall behind his peers without creating a huge scandal.
Proposition 209 or whatever it was destroyed public education in California I'm told.
I wanted him to go to public schools -- but I would be sending him to the test -- the very forms of aptitude evaluation that I have blogged about here that I found totally bogus in the course of my research on the Progressive Era and American education reform.
So de facto, we are opting for the private route to Utopia. I remember my fantastic Nixon-hating, ecologically-minded, brilliant, liberal public school teachers in Mt. Vernon with regret and chagrin. They taught me everything good I know about learning and the world they taught me to hope for is simply not going to come to be, not in California at any rate.
2 Comments:
Why don't you homeschool Leo or better yet, give him $20 and let him wander downtown by himself. Now THAT would be an education and better than the one he would receive in a public school.
I've been working towards a revolution in education here in Portland, Maine. I've still got a long way to go but I believe it can be done quickly and without additional cost.
Better teachers are key to any reform. Currently, education majors in college score lower on standardized tests than any other major. They would also need to have a degree in something other than "Education".
I have taught in both public and private schools and the only differences I noticed were; (private school) teachers were uncertified and held a degree in a subject, they scored higher on verbal aptitude tests and the parents of the students paid a boatload of money to send them there. The classrooms were maybe a little smaller and the food was a little better. There is no reason why our public schools could not be a great as our private schools. Check out my website www.gnuteacher.com for more ideas for education reform.
Gnuteacher,
I like the idea of just giving Leo $20.00 and sending him downtown -- but wait, there is no downtown in Irvine. There are just minimall, strips and more minimalls.
So what we need here is a-- Downtown!
I checked out your website and fournd it very inspiring. I can almost endorse all your suggestions for cheap, immediate reform of public schools EXCEPT for the piped in music.
I find the piped in music in malls and other public spaces unbearable.
But why is it that the smartest students self-select out of choosing "education' as their major? Is it because of the low respect and low pay of the professions or is it because education courses are so uninteresting and functionalist at the undergraduate level that the problem already arises here -- the intellectually curious and interested people opt out of education because education curriculum is bad?
I feel as if we made the right decision for Leo, but not for our bank accounts. But I'm not willing to give up on public education altogether. I think public schools can be better at certain things than private schools...but the crisis in education is endemic to an increasing split between mainstream functionalism and a kind of progressive elitism and it doesn't produce a pretty political picture.
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