Has anyone not standing under the federal education spending tree trying to catch falling dollars advocated for charter schools?
Seriously, who (aside from investors, teachers with egoic involvement in their own superiority, union-busters, and religious partisans who want unique textbooks for their kids) wants these things?
I think you pretty much covered it.
Maybe also believers in ‘woo’? Vaccers, flat earthers and so on?
Most of those probably also fall under religious partisans depending on how you define the terms.
From the UK, I gather there’s a fairly significant number of parents who don’t want to send their kids to a bricks and mortar school due to concerns about bullying so I suppose there’s a market there (for the online version only obviously).
No, I can’t remember the actual title of the class thus the quotes. However that was the understood function of that class and in fact most of the students in the class were either on the football team.
It really was supposed to be the easy pass math credit, probably if the TA wasn’t fresh off the plane I might not have needed the outside help.
The solution has been obvious from the start.
Get students to teachers.
12:1 maximum ratio
compensate teachers fairly
hire specialists to spend time with kids who fall behind
make the school safe from discrimination, garbage food, violence, and advertising
You’ll have fantastic results, and it will cost far less than a civil war.
Well, yes, except that like every obvious solution, each of those things is in fact very difficult.
You’re not wrong, but the biggest difference would come from hiring 2.5 times as many teachers.
Expensive, but utterly worthwhile.
Wiki seyz:
Students learning to be global citizens through global education will be able to learn more about international communities, social justice issues, global events, and international ideas in their typical classroom setting. Global Education will shape the way people view the world to help better shape the world. It will foster service learning initiatives and activism within the community and around the world
Sounds very fuzzy, like training to be missionaries of some agenda I can’t quite put my finger on. I guess I remain confused. Can you give me any concrete examples of how this is put in practice at your kids school?
Me too. Straight As in math until Algebra 2 (Self-Paced). I think the D was out of pity so I didn’t fail the class.
A long-time acquaintance is a principal at a nearby charter school. They do online classes with kids sitting in one place at computers, something like a classroom but they call it an enhanced technology-assisted safe learning space or some such thing.
According to him, it takes the best of online learning (paced for the student) and the best part of a classroom setting (supervision of the children) and combines it. Most of the students were thrown out of other schools, and discipline is still a problem, and their scores suck even compared to the city school district’s non-magnet schools. (The magnet schools, for science and the arts, out-perform almost all the suburbs in test scores.)
According to random stories he’s told, the only reason parents choose his charter school is because their kids have been thrown out of all the other schools.
One of things that’s emphasized in Montessori educational models is tactile learning- recognizing that learning is a sensory experience, and therefore create an environment designed to stimulate all the senses, something that can’t really be replicated in a purely online format.
While I’d say of course there are outliers for whom an online education might be more beneficial, my guess is that’s a pretty small minority of students as a whole.
That’s true enough. But I’m inclined to agree about the efficacy of online education (or lack thereof).
Also, I was just noting it as a general response to @werdnagreb’s comment about what the goal of an education should be.
Authentic Montessori is actually rather old-fashioned, with lots of drilling in things like math, and very very different from something like Waldorf (which is also old fashioned, but based on an oddball religio-philosophical framework rather than actual psychology). However, the term “Montessori” is not protected as of 50 years ago, and there are many instantiations that are not authentic.
Ironically, the modern public educational system in the US traces back historically mainly to John Dewey, whose philosophy was by almost any measure much more of a radical departure from traditional education.
The difference is that these kinds of schools could never make it in the public system since they can never “prove” (and I mean that sarcastically and cynically) that a child is learning since there is no testing.
Of course there has been (independent) work evaluating the educational effectiveness of such programs, eg here.
(For the record, I’m a university math professor, not an expert on elementary ed or someone with a vested interest in Montessori.)
Gods-be-damned weird integer ring structure!
I’m not going to argue against that, actually. I only said what I did because I know personally of some private schools that provide an excellent education without charging too much and making a (meager) profit. They might be outliers and there are good questions of equity and reproducibility on a large scale. So, I would really prefer higher quality public schools, but that requires public will that I am not seeing in Canada (or the US) right now.
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