school choice

It Really Takes All Of Us Coming Together

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

Today’s post #1001 is a bit anti-climatic after my 1000th post yesterday.

If a two years ago someone had told me I’d be sitting in the same room with someone from the Walton Family Foundation and working with them to create better educational options, I would have laughed.  I would have thought that our causes were so totally separate.  That sentiment would have been clouded by our vastly different political views.  I would not have not been able to see past our political differences to see that we want so many of the same things.

Before I started working with charter schools, I have to admit I was anti-charter school.  Part of that is that I didn’t know enough to form an informed opinion–but I did anyway.  As most of us do about things that we think we understand.  There are just somethings that you have to investigate and really examine before you can make a decision about the movement.  There is something we could all learn from this movement.  This is a movement that transcends political lines.  It transcends socioeconomic status, even though many of us working towards reform are middle and upper-middle class.  It is a movement that highlights the dissatisfaction with our current educational system.  It is not a movement that privatizes education.  Are there private donors in the game?  Yes.  Part of that is because charter schools are not given the same funds as traditional public schools.  In some state they are given about 50% as much money as the traditional public system.  The only way to make up that gap is to seek funding from these big philanthropic organizations.

Many of my ideas about education reform have changed.  Much of that once I had kids and that was even compounded by the fact that my kids are black kids.  I began looking at the disparities in our education system with a different lens–that of a parent.  I am fortunate that I can afford (with major scrimping and sacrifice) to send my kids to a great private school.  Would I like a great public option?  YES.  Would I like a tax credit to offset some of the cost because I live in a school district that doesn’t have high or even moderately performing public options?  YES.

What I really want is an educational system that serves everyone equally and provides choice.  Public school options should be similar to private school options. I should be able to pick the school that is best for my kid.  I should be able to pick the school that works best for our family and provides the education I want for my kids.  Each school should be different.  Each school should be able to define for itself and its community what type of school it is going to be.  This is why I have moved over to the pro-charter camp.  I want choice.  I believe all parents should have choice and not just parents who can afford private schools.  All parents should have choice.

So I will continue to sit in the room with those who I once thought couldn’t be more different than me.  But we are all working towards the same goal–what is best for kids.  Giving kids and parents the choice that is rightfully theirs.

Choice Matters

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I have long espoused that one of the problems I see with our current education system is that it operates as a one size fits all ideology.  This is also the problem with many teacher education programs.  One size fits all is a fallacy.  We all aren’t the same.  Our kids aren’t all the same.  If we were doing our job right–our test scores and students performance would fit perfectly on the bell-curve.  Well, guess what it doesn’t.  We have a huge proportion of our kids who are in the bottom–more than should be.  Will there always be kids at the bottom?  Yes.  Just as there will always be kids at the top and the rest happily spread out in the middle.

Our educational system is bottom heavy in terms performance on a bell-curve.  Especially in our urban schools.  But even in our suburban schools–the system we have doesn’t work for everyone.  We talk about choice and how charters are about choice–I agree they should be about choice and they should be about different.  Schools that try the same thing that other schools have failed at are not offering a choice.  They are offering the idea of a choice.

My kids are in private school.  That is a choice I made.  I looked long and hard for a school that fit my kids and fit what I believe is important as a parent and as an educator.  My kids school is small and we pay a lot of money for their education.  But if you look at per pupil expenditure–they don’t spend much more than the local urban district.  One thing that is different is that my kids school has a mission.  A clear mission and everyone in the building has bought into that mission.  The students are at the center of the mission.

At many public schools, there is no mission.  They are the defacto choice and don’t need a mission to help hold the school together.  I would argue that they do.  There is no reason why every district school has to look like the every other one.  Why can’t districts create schools the have a mission. A mission that guides instruction and choice.  A mission that puts students first.  A mission that parents can understand and use to determine which school to enroll their child.

We have to think outside of the box.  We need to think about how our education can be redesigned to serve our constantly changing population.  Just because I live on x street shouldn’t dictate where my kid goes to school. As a parent, I should get to look at all schools in my district and determine the best fit for my child.  I know that this would pose a problem with transportation, etc.  I get that–but then maybe we don’t need to offer transportation any more.  Maybe we need to think about transportation and other ways to do this effectively so that where someone lives doesn’t dictate the school they have to go to.

I know that in some districts Magnet schools were meant to do this–but many of them are only innovative on the surface and still teach and design coursework the same way as the district does.

This is why I support choice.  I think that when something gets too big the only way to manage it is to streamline and make everything uniform.  So each school and each class is taught the same thing in often the same way and at the same time.  This makes it easy for those who manage the system, but does nothing to develop learning in the staff nor the students.

School districts are too big.  Sure it’s nice to have a central office to handle all the paperwork, etc.  But is the trade off really worth it?  Does it make sense to create huge conglomerate districts. The larger something gets that harder it is to change and who loses out? The little guy.  The little guy in this case is the students.  They are the 99% in education.

This is why charter schools have caught on so greatly.  They are little “districts” and they give parents an option.  They give parents a choice of what type of school they want their kids to attend.  Larger districts could revision their schools and create the autonomy needed to allow for such free-thinking.  Allow each school to determine what is best based on the population who has chosen their school.

We need to not only think outside the box–we need to revision why we have a box in the first place.  Students don’t fit in any box I’ve seen.

Rich Kids Get Taught, Poor Kids Get Tested

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 3 Comments

This idea has been rumbling around my head for years.  As I continue the preliminary work on my dissertation, mentor urban high school teachers and work with charter schools, I find this to be more and more true.  Testing has become the new “reform” movement in urban education.  And not just annual testing–but every 6 week testing.  As a researcher, I can appreciate the need/desire for data.  As a teacher, I appreciate the need for data.  It is the means by which we gauge how our students are doing.  But it has to be contextualized.  When we test just to test there is no context for the student and without context and prior knowledge, the test and its questions are meaningless.

Tests and assessments of where students are and how they are doing, should be formative and not standardized.  This isn’t to say that standardized tests don’t have a place at the table, but they should be the only guests invited.  Too often they are the only guests in urban schools, leaving our poor and too often minority kids being tested instead of taught.  This focus on testing also limits the type of education they are exposed to and leads to a curriculum that is grounded in test prep benchmarks and not grounded in what is good for kids.  There are so many reasons why this irritates me and one of them is that it prevents me from sending my kids to public schools in the city where I live.  There are no options available, charter or traditional, that do not have a central focus on testing and measuring, that I can send my kids to.  This isn’t to say that some of these schools whose central standard of evaluation is testing, do not offer a decent education for kids, but the level of education is dictated and restricted by the testing and doesn’t fit with my kids needs or my philosophy of education.

I hate that there aren’t public school options that mirror my own educational philosophy in my city.  The suburban schools are better on so many levels–because the tests are just part of what happens and most only use the state standardized test and that test doesn’t dictate content or experience.  I also am irritated that almost every new school that opens follows this testing model as though it is the only urban reform that works. It is the easiest urban reform, but not the only one.  I long for a new public school to open that actually thinks about how kids learn and not how to best test kids. If there was a public school option that actually put kids learning first and testing at the end of the line, I would stop paying $14k a year per kid for private school.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that students need to be assessed.  We must know where our students are strong and where they are weak, but there are many other ways to assess a student beyond a nationally normed standardized test.  My son is assessed regularly and both of his teachers can tell me at any time where he is excelling and where he is struggling and his school does not use standardized tests and doesn’t have textbooks–aside from Math starting in 5th grade.  The school produces National Merit Scholars (5 this year).  Yes the school is made up of middle-class and upper-middle class families.  But I argue that I want the exact same things for my kids that all parents want for their kids–a great education.  I want the same thing for my kids that I believe every kids deserves.

The education I have chosen for my kids is not for every child.  I think that is why choice is so important.  Sure as new schools open, they are giving parents a choice but not the level of choice that parents needs.  Some kids need more hands on learning, some kids need more freedom, some kids need strict structure.  We have to have choices, but choice for choice sake isn’t enough.  We need real choices.  We need philosophical choices.  We need pedagogical choices.  We need to work with parents to allow them to pick the best environment for their children.

We need a revolution in education lead by educators and parents.  Not by master marketers,  businessmen and politicians.  Choice must be part of it, but it has to be real choice that offers something different.  Something better.  Something that puts kids first.  We can argue that the good models are the restrictive, extended day charter schools that focus on testing.  But where is the something different to compare them too?  One size does not fit all and if this is the only road we are going to explore, we will end up exactly where we are now, wondering what the answer is and how we fix our educational system.

Crap–I’m going to have to start my own flippin school.