A somewhat surprising article by Fred Hess about the lack of alternatives to public schools and the failure of charter schools and vouchers to bring about something new. Hess says that not enough has been done to nurture entrepreneurship.
6 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love”
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Apt. 11d 
I’ve also read somewhere (Eduwonk?) that NCLB’s provisions for outside tutoring are both underutilized and problematic. If I remember correctly, the underperforming school is supposed to be in charge of administering the tutoring programs!
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As long as you’re consuming some good old-fashioned right-wing propaganda (the best kind!), may I suggest this book? (I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to and it sounds like it’s up our alleys.)
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The whole thing sounds like ‘American Parents are retarded, we must convince them to support something they don’t want, instead of doing what they do want’. Ultimately treating education as if it was a soft drink to be sold to the public.
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The reason I posted a link to this article was that it was a pro-choice guy pointing out the problems with choice. The top charter school models haven’t multiplied. New private providers haven’t materialized. I don’t think that Hess mentioned the tutoring problems in the paper, but I saw him on a panel at APSA where another panelist had written a paper on the problems with NCLB’s tutoring program. If we have put all this effort into creating alternatives and fostering entrepreneurship, why don’t we just invest that time back into public education?
Dr. Manhattan, I just skimmed the outline of the book you recommended. Looks interesting. Didn’t really look conservative to me.
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“If we put all this effort into creating alternatives and fostering entrepeneurship, why don’t we just invest that time back into public education?”
1. Charter schools are public schools.
2. Charter schools often are given a lot less money to work with than standard public schools are, and have not infrequently faced logistical problems with payroll and facilities that public schools don’t. For details, see Joanne Jacobs “Our School”, which is the biography of a successful charter.
3. I think that the basic issue is that there is no engine for reform in the public schools, nothing to motivate improvement. the paychecks keep coming no matter what. Some of us parents may care passionately about school reform. However, if the school isn’t interested in changing, all it has to do is wait us out. We’ll be gone in a few years, after all. (This is a harsh and unfair summary, of course, but I don’t have time for more nuance this morning. A good teacher and a bad teacher get paid the same, and the good teacher has to work a lot harder. So in effect, the good teacher gets paid less per hour than the bad teacher.)
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Looks like you’ve got some spam. DELETE THAT FUCKER! DELETE HIM NOW! (Y’know, on my blog, they actually try to disguise their spam-posts…)
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