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Private, public, charter, gifted, homeschooling....for my three kids, so I appreciate Amy's investigation of schools, looking for a good fit for her children.
Something she never brings up is the elephant in the room. Colleges of education routinely attract the lowest-quality high school students on every measure--GPA, test scores, essay writing, extracurriculars, leadership, you name it. This is the market at work. The cream of the crop go into medicine and law and engineering. Or maybe the humanities, where they end up teaching at universities.
It goes without saying that there are many exceptions--dedicated, smart people working in the service of children and their intellectual development--but frankly there are not enough.
I work in schools as a substitute teacher in mostly urban areas in Cleveland. Some schools are poorer than others, and I work with diverse populations (although every school I work at is not necessarily diverse). The behavior and intelligence of most of the young teachers I work with is appalling on every level. I could write a book on it (and probably will). The conversations in the faculty lounges are inane blather about the latest reality show if they're not mocking students or their parents.
The particular system I work in is perhaps not representative, as many of the public school teachers in my own upper middle class suburb are warm, intelligent boomer women. Nevertheless, even there, where I have worked on the inside, compliance is king. Students who want to figure things out for themselves, who ask a lot of questions, or who point out inconsistencies in textbooks or curricular content are considered bad in some way, and there is truly never an opportunity for the teachers to seize a teachable moment for fear of not covering testable material.
Private schools are able to circumvent some of the problems by opting out of some of the testing and choosing teachers who pursued graduate education in the field of study (say, Biology or English) rather than Education/licensure. (For all you parents who fall sucker to the private schools who brag that all their teachers are certified, you are getting a raw deal. Far better that your child's history teacher know history than know the latest techniques of "classroom management"--read: child control.)
There's really too much to say here, but I'm thrilled that Amy is interested in starting a discussion and even volunteering her generation to take on the issue. She needs to look at Finland and France and other places where the integrity of the education is a priority over obedience, where they value independent, rigorous scientific thinking, where the government trains the teachers in content and sends them to the children only AFTER the training, rather than the practice here of having almost all of the teachers going back for further educational classes WHILE they are taking on the herculean job of educating our kids.
One small point of disagreement: On the diversity thing, suburban schools are completely homogeneous. My children who attend public school are in classrooms with children who are all white and upper class. The one who goes downtown to the Jesuit school has a far greater diversity in every way, not only b/c the Jesuits make it a priority to offer scholarships to the local kids, but also b/c the school draws from all over Cleveland. Many private schools offer financial aid.
I'm not advocating private schools. Some are better, most have the opportunity to do things a little differently (although they do not actually have more money per student), but a surprising number simply mimic the public schools. Mostly, they are simply unaffordable for people.
This is a complex issue that deserves a lot of attention.
