PhatPhysiks.com

The New York Times is running a long atictle talking about the Obama educational plan called Race to the Top.    Fox news, and everyone else, is talking about how wonderful charter schools and places like KIPP are. There are no doubt that many of these succesful.  There is also little reason for us to be surprised at that success, or even to think that success can be applied to a comprehensive school.

That is a bold statment, and one that is at the center of the misunderstanding of most people not involved in comprehensive education.  Nearly every example of success comes from a school that in some way is able to select it’s students.  If it is a suburban school, there  is not only the barrier to moving into the district, but also a willingness of stakeholders to support extreme punishments for minor offenses.  It can easily be imagined that such rules can be applied selectively to remove students who are difficult to educate.

The selective process for KIPP and like schools are more obvious.  For any private or charter school, they must only accept those that apply and goes through a sometime rigourous process.  This means the parent has to come in with the child and often interview.  Unlike a public school where all students with an adress in the district must be accepted, KIPP and schools like it are free to discourage students they don’t want.  Any proffesional can create a clearly hostile environment without breaking any laws are leaving significant evidence.  Even an unwanted student insists on being enrolled, there is often a contract to accept extreme consequences and leves of mistreatment for minor behaviors.  At the very least, the unwanted students is not going to the educational problem she or he would be in a comprehensive school where every child has a right to an education.

The point of this post is not to say that KIPP or any other school is not educating kids, or doing what they think is best for the future of the children, but simply to point out there is a difference between the schools that are in the news for excellence and comprehensive schools.  Comprhensive schools must be in the bussiness of educating every student, and by definition can’t expel kids just because they are hard to educate.  This country is very good at educating kids that want to learn, educating kids that have been trained at home to mind authority, educating that kid that is a pleasure to have in the classroom.

What we have trouble with is educating the other, likely majority, of the population.  How to do get a student through high school?  What do we do in middle school so the average kids will want to stay past sixteen and not drop out?  These are the questions that are not being answered.  The answer we get is to create schools of homogenous minimally motivated students, rid ourselves of the 25 to 50 percent who give up, and then have great success with the remainder.  I say that is not good enough.

We need to do better.  We need teachers that likes kids, because if a kid is attached to a teacher then they are more likely to stay for the four years.  A teacher that is in the classroom for two years in order to pay off student loans is not neccesarily that teacher.  A teacher that has been teaching kids for 20 years without any major incident likely is.

We need curriculum that meets the needs of the student.  Paper and pencil is not the norm.  Note talking, while a critical college skill, cannot be the sole basis for a class.  Students expect increasing levels of customization of thier work.  Everyone working on the same worksheet is not where it is at.  Exploring simulations on the computer, working through problems, building genuine products is what is expected.

Standardized exams, even when measured on growth, do not measure what the kid has learned.  These exams do not measure developmental growth, such as the ability to sit for hours and work a problem.  They measure the trivia that can be taught in any classroom with hand selected student, but not useful knowledge.  Saying that one school is better than another because of SAT or AP scores is not really a rational statement.

I will make one more bold statement.  Before the US began obsessing on doing well on standardized exams as compared to other country, we did well in genuine education.  We built cars, we built computers, we wrote code, we created indsutries that did not exist.  Our problem is not education, but the idea that we need to compete on paper as opposed in reality.  I do not care how many engineers some other country says they have.  What I care is that scandinavia is taking over the programming and telephone industry.

It is expected for the followers to eventually take over mature industries, that is the way the world works.  The way the leaders remain leaders is to foster creativity so that new industries are created.  The one sure way to fall is to think that existing industries are more important than new industries, and to focus public policy on the maintainance of old technology.  Knowing how to build a bridge is not such a big deal.  We must know how to build new bridges.

We used to teach kids how to build new bridges.  Now place like KIPP are lauded as successes because they teach kids how to copy the same old bridge.