Reply #15: Of course one-size-fits-all is bad.

[LWolf]

I've never, in my 26 years in public education, met a teacher who thought otherwise.

One-size-fits-all is part of the "standards and accountability" movement, which is, in the long run, destroying public education.

Don't take that to mean that I, and other educators, don't want high standards, and object to being accountable for the things we can control.

But that's not really the agenda of the group running things right now.

I have always been a vocal supporter of more local control, and more choices, within the public education system. It is certainly possible. I worked for 21 years at two different public schools that modeled those concepts. That all went away in the 90s with the advent of the standards and accountability movement.

One outcome of that movement has been to forcibly standardize schools. Not many educators did this willingly. Another outcome is to further the blame game, the mis-direction propaganda setting educators up as incompetent, which furthers the march towards privatization.

Your example? My objection is that ALL public schools aren't allowed to specialize, or to customize their learning programs. That charter schools are allowed to do so, and are exempt from many of the regulations that public schools are not, and that they do so with public money.

One of the outcomes of a less-regulated charter school system is that schools can be great or horrific; until a local district decides to revoke a charter, there are few quality controls. Should a district attempt to adopt something that is working, and apply it to all, it immediately becomes watered down and ineffective. Charter schools as pilots simply feed into the one-size-fits all mentality, with the assumption that if a "pilot" program is successful, then it will be adopted district wide.

So what should be done?

Here are just some of my proposals; I've shared them many, many times:

1. Abolish NCLB, which helps the further degradation of public education.
2. Turn the bureacracy upside down- put the power in the hands of the stakeholders: families and teachers at the local site level. Put the admins in charge of facilitating the decisions made by those stake-holders. Leave reasonable regulatory controls in place, but get rid of much of the miles-thick, labyrinthian ed code.
3. Reduce class sizes in all grade levels across the board to the research-based optimum 15.
4. Fully, and differently, fund the general fund. No more ADA, which is just an excuse to NOT fully fund. Fund every school equally. And, along with that, get rid of categorical funding, with too many strings attached, for special needs students. Fund support services for any student who demonstrates any need, whether or not they meet a pre-determined self-limiting statistical qualification.
5. Invest in clean, safe, healthy, modern, school environments.
6. Invest in abundant resources of every type for every school.
7. Provide a complete support staff for tutoring, supervising, counseling, health care, and all other duties outside of instructional duties that teachers now do themselves or do without.
8. A longer school year; 200 instructional days.
9. Non-student days for all meetings, staff development, etc. that eat into the time that teachers have to plan high-quality experiences, evaluate results, and customize to suit.
10. Universal FREE public pre-school - college and/or trade school. Including full-day kindergarten.
11. Provide health-conscious meals, breakfast, lunch, and snack to all students, every day. No junk foods or drink.
12. Provide supervised small group "study halls" for all every day, instead of homework.
13. PE every day.
14. Extensive music and art for all.
15. Allow individual schools to choose a focus, philosophy, methodology, etc., and allow families within that district to choose their school.
16. Expand transportation services to allow # 15.
17. A comprehensive, radically aggressive program to address universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care, poverty, adult illiteracy, and adult education levels in every community, since those factors influence learning outcomes more powerfully than the best school program.


The problem with the changes, improvements, etc. that charter schools offer is that they don't offer them to all. As long as you allow yourself to be convinced that real, radical, systemic, positive change can't be effected within the system, you perpetuate the destruction of public education.