AS one who did not supposedly do too well in the public education system I’d like to comment on the scenario. At age 60 I’m probably very well informed on a lot of subjects because I’ve always kept some of the early flames of childhood alive. This, despite the fact that financial ruin and industrialized farming have destroyed the small community where I drew most of my inspiration for learning from.

1. Learning is not all about books, writing reports and classroom processing. In a book that I have only seen on Amazon.com, ‘Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling’, the authors explore that which happens in the public spaces where ideas are formed, processes put in place, procedures laid down, and events take place that shape our minds, bodies and lives; these phenomena also count as education. If the public discourse is heavily shaped by the dollar grubbing, prestige seeking, self centered minions of the top 500 corporations; that public discourse is still not owned by them. Try as they might to dominate it, we can still contribute and significantly shape the public mind via spaces like Truthdig.com.

2. For education to happen, for a mind to grow and remain open to new ideas, for children to successfully face the challenges of mastering increasing amounts of information, there must first be the formation of a team. Parents and their children, communities and their school boards, teachers and administrators must sit down together and agree that education matters. They must do more. They must agree that the love of scholastic things is important. I loved the smell of a newly sharpened pencil as a kid. I yearned to look into the new books the small public library had just purchased. I fell in love with calligraphy and drawing and music and art and philosophy and science and astronomy and history. As long we who are concerned about education can rekindle the love of scholarship in the minds of those around us, as long as we keep alive the faith that discussion of mind matters, then there is hope.

I gained a sense from Rose’s piece that he paints a monolithic image of charter schools.  A charter school is in and of itself nothing more than a public entity which holds a contractual agreement with either the local, county or state school board of a particular place.  Using this increased autonomy, Charter schools tend to work along ‘multiple dimensions’ in order to increase academic excellence.  Each and every charter school is different in some way or another.  Many charter schools serve this country’s most underprivileged students.  Frankly, public education is doing just fine in predominately white, affluent communities—so let’s narrow the discussion here.  Many charters are in areas such as South Central and Harlem—where generation after generation of people have been cheated of an education—and they make important adjustments.  I think that quite often we lose sight of how fundamentally messed-up the educational environment is in some places.  For example, at a school in South Central, Los Angeles—where by 85% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch—the charter agency hired a catering company to begin providing more nutritious food.  Almost as a knee-jerk reaction, progressives immediately denounced this move as a form of privatization and a gross violation of public funds.  Sure, theoretically speaking, private catering companies should not be profiting from public funds.  However, when you have kids living in straight destitution—often coming to school with an empty stomach and then eating soda and chips from he vending machine—how can anyone expect them to focus and learn?  Needless to say, the traditional cafeteria food was anything but nutritious.  Another adjustment, which is an extremely important factor for many parents in South Central, is increased safety on campus.  In response, the charter school hired a private security team.  Needless to say, this too caused a knee-jerk reaction from many progressives—particularly those speaking from the other side of town.
You know, innovating the school system is the right thing.  Traditional district schools have grossly neglected many communities across the nation for too long.  All this lofty talk about bringing in a diverse and well-balanced curriculum is nice and all—but it doesn’t help the situation of little Joe, who has been pushed through the factory-like system all the way to high school, while still reading at a 3 grade level.  If focusing strictly on reading and math for a year will bring him up to par—and maybe even get him into college—then so be it!

I was educated grades 1-8 in a rural one-room school-house. I graduated from a small High-school in 1952; the mix of country kids and town kids being about 50-50. Ironically, every year when another senior class graduated the honor students were predominately from the country schools. One could suggest that the work environment of the farm culture had much to do with this disparity; however, I believe it had more to do with the 8-grades in one-room environment. I was one of those honor students. I was reading library books that the 7th and 8th grade students were encouraged to read when I was in the 4th grade. I could hear and absorb all the information that was being taught to the upper class. This phenomena started in 1st grade and I am certain it was the same for all the other eventual honor students.

Today kids are herded into a classroom where it is a case of either absorb it or get moved to the next class where the chance of failure is almost certain. There is a better way, but it is not socially acceptable. The student is provided a workbook(s) that encompass all that grade is supposed to cover. That student is moved to the next workbook/class when they have learned a minimum of 90% of the information in that workbook. Some kids will move to the next class in 6-months, others may take 2-years. The end goal is to learn. We presently waste $millions on graduating kids that can’t even read, but were just passed on so they could be with there peers of the same age. They would be far better served to learn at a very young age that we are not all created equal and some will just have to work longer and harder to reach their goals.

This system would also provide the slower learners with good skills of the basic needs (reading, writing, arithmetic, and hard work). Those students can become the carpenters, machinists, masons, equipment operators, etc. that we so badly need, but are now often times hampered by a lack of the basic skills.

Doublestandards/Glasshouses:

Suggest that along with reference citations you give brief summary of main substance in a sentence or two. Many who read this site will not go to citations, so you have lost the moment to catch their attention and get the gist of your references across.

A very wise, very successful and respected teacher once told a group of parents that ‘Learning should be fun, it should be interesting and above all it should be relevant to the needs of the child.” Unfortunatley our public school system is more concerned about the students passing standardized tests than in learning. Learning cannot be predetermined. Learning cannot be put into a one size fits all. Learning must be done in an atmosphere of respect. Children must feel comfortable with their teachers, not afraid of them.

Our inner city schools are in chaos for a variety of reasons: 1) Underfunded by intent. 2)Overcrowded by intent. Teachers cannot teach when they feel exploited, overworked and certainly not appreciated. Overcrowded classrooms are NOT conducive to learning for the children!
3) Public school systems must take into account that massive layoffs promote poverty, which in turn promotes crime, chaos and very unstable situations for children. Where these factors prevail, learning becomes very difficult for a child. 4) Scapegoating parents and/or teachers is NOT a solution. Public school systems, our state and federal leaders must respect the teaching profession as well as the students and parents! 5) Today’s youth is NOT stupid! They see where hundreds of thousands of American workers are on unemployment because our government fails to enact national policy to stop outsourcing of our jobs. With that in mind, what is the incentive to learn and get a diploma? 6) Privatization of our public schools has never been a solution, nor will it ever be such! The corporatists want to control our education system just as they control our healthcare, our government, etc.

President Obama and the Democratic Party had better wake up. Bashing teacher unions who helped get him into office will only erode much needed support for 2012. At this point in his administration Obama and the Democrats need support whereever they can get it, upon EARNING IT!

About once a decade I will read an essay or book that hits the nail on the head about education. This is certainly one. Having spent about the same amount of time in the profession as Mike Rose, I have experienced all the fads and quick-fixes he outlines here. (I even heard of a new charter school in my city that is going to experiment with “team teaching”!) Let’s see…. 1963? I’ve been at the cutting edge of “smaller schools” since it became a fad and have found, as Dr. Rose did, that it is often mediocre teaching in a more intimate setting. One of the problems many charters are having is administrators thinking that the school is their personal business and drawing 2-3 times the salary of their counterparts in the school down the road.

The real question is… “What is the purpose of schooling in a democratic society”? If we believe, as most of our society does, that it is to generate more “thinking, feeling, productive workers”, then we have limited our possibilities for the future.

As one of my education mentors said in the 60’s, “the schools are the state’s and they do the state’s work”. If we leave decisions about education and schooling to businessmen, governors, and corporations-as we seem to have done- we will continue in the slide to irrelevance and mediocrity that we seem to be in.

Mike Rose has told us how it is and how it can be. Read it and weep.

Thanks, all!  Including thatgal99 and Rose.  From my experience, Rose’s detailed analysis is accurate and bears keeping in the front of the discussion.
  Thatgal99 hits directly on an important part of the curethe—broad, consistent and deeply sensitive parent participation at the community level to support local schols, not blame them. 
  I could go on and on because I am deeply concerned about the way education is being used as a political “football” and people expect some magic “fix”.  In such a situation, any ideological faction can come in and take over if parents are not watching or are too busy to care.
  I can’t relax on this subject because schools are vitally important to democracy. Most of us know what to do, but we don’t participate—just criticize from the sidelines and hope for the best.  That ain’t gonna get it this time.
  Public education is an endanered species in today’s corporate America and you’d better believe it. The opportunity to change schools for the better may not last much longer.
  Do you want your kids to grow up to be corporate proles?  That’s the present meaning of “excellence” and “race to the top” and “no child left behind” and “merit pay” and all the rest of the notions coming out of corporatocracy.
  Read Rose.  Read Jonathan Kozol. Observe for yourself what’s going on.

It is refreshing to read the ideas espoused here.  Having just returned from my local school/parent meeting, I am very disturbed by the immediate repercussions of the budget cuts and their affect on my Los Angeles community.  Teachers, administrators and parents are demoralized in this climate.  Classroom instruction of any value is threatened.  Please, if you read this article, you care - attend your local school meetings and find out how bad things really are.  Then, locate your community spirit - you know it exists - show up for our children.  Make your mark for change.  Our children are being educated to become worker drones and soldiers.  That’s obvious - the question is, what are we going to do about it?  (Hint: the answer does not reside in the Obama administration and their desire to carry out the mind-numbing testing paradigm.)

Wonderful ideas here. Rose is correct that we pay far too little respect to the hard-won experience of journeyman teachers.

Taxpayers ought to be enraged that we’ve wasted so much time on NCLB. As long as we judge students and their teachers by such arbitrary standards, we are kidding ourselves about “progress.”

I just spent several weeks inside a public school on the edge of an Indian reservation. Great principal. Small classes. Teachers with more patience and caring than I could previously have imagined. Yet many kids are struggling.

One teacher said to me that it’s all about poverty and that she knows many of the parents and some of the students see her as just some white woman spouting a lot of nonsense. It was humbling, but I think that as long as we look to schools to overcome all the inequity that our society creates, we’re bound to fail.