During discussions around the education system a phrase that comes up quite a bit is this idea of School Choice. School Choice basically gives parents the power and freedom to choose their child’s education based on the school's quality and their children's needs and not their home address. This freedom to choose is supposed to encourage healthy competition among schools and other institutions to better serve students’ needs and priorities.
When it comes time to choose my where my child will go to school some important factors are going to be the school's graduation rates, it's facilities and resources, motivated students and teachers, and an environment that will best prepare him for college.
When my wife and I were deciding on where we would be moving recently, a critical piece of that decision was to make sure that it was located near what we considered good schools based off the criteria listed above. The High School in the area we ended up choosing had an average student GPA of 3.6, average ACT score is 24.5, 92% of the students graduate, 87% of those students will go on to college and is on the list of Newsweek's 2012 Best High Schools in America. Seemed like a perfect school district to raise our child in.
Yesterday, I was reading through our local newspaper and saw that there was an article about that very same High School which talked about how it was considered failing according to No Child Left Behind Standards. The article also mentioned that 2/3 of all Illinois schools including all but 11 high schools failed to make adequate yearly progress according to NCLB standards. Now having gone through our Public Discourse class and having understanding the lack of credibility of the NCLB standards, this really didn't surprise but only reaffirmed my belief that the criteria in which current reforms measures school success is, for lack of a better term, crap.
This made me wonder, how many other people read that same article or chose not to send their son to that High School because they heard that it was considered failing, when in all actuality it's an excellent school where nearly every student graduates and most move on to higher education. This was just another example of how current reforms and the way they measure success vs. failure are extremely skewed and need to be changed.
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I agree that the current "system" is a load of crap. As Michelle Rhee said, "when did it stop being about the students?" Of course a school is a business and they have to make their numbers. A teacher is just like being a salesman. They specialize in a product and they have a sales goal to meet. The only difference is salesmen seek out new business, but the business is brought to the teacher. It is the teachers job to maintain and keep that business. It's all about business and not about the students. The focus of education needs to be kept on the students.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. When I was doing my book review I examined our distorted view of success. We are pushing students along a "assembly line" type of system and only caring about test scores; this is not what defines success. We can't have effective school reform until we have an ideological reform on what we consider student and teacher success. I don't have any children, but I can imagine how frustrating it must be to think that he is going to be evaluated in such a system
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