Post by slh1234 on Jan 16, 2010 4:05:59 GMT
This is a continuation of the discussion from the GW board where schools began being discussed.
bxs, based entirely on the examples of school that you gave, I am guessing that the schools you went to are in New York City. Is that correct? And you gave examples you said were from your school experience. So how much of your opinion of public schools in the US are based on your experience? And with that flavoring your perception, what are you predisposed to believe when you look at other schools elsewhere? Would you agree that much like what someone else pointed out about us not being able to infer much about the state of climate science based on one bad surface station, we can't infer much about the overall state of eduction - public or private - based on one school, one neighborhood, or even one city (even if that is New York city)?
Let me introduce you to two other parts of the country, and a little about my experience there. I currently live in the San Francisco bay area, the 13 years prior to that, I lived in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area (Staying close to my Cherokee heritage). While in Tulsa, my older two daughters did most of their education. My younger daughter finished her high school in California. Both of these completed high school in public schools. My son goes to a private school, but that is another story all together.
I was very involved with my girls activities. This led me to work with youth a great deal while they were in school. I'm taking a break from that now.
In Tulsa, there are more expensive neighborhoods, and less expensive neighborhoods. As you can probably guess, that will correlate very tightly with "good" schools and "not good" schools. I don't know if the neighborhoods are more expensive because of schools, or the other way around. My guess is that it is a combination of both. So can you guess which schools the good teachers want to work at? And I would imagine that would allow them to be more selective.
The 3 biggest schools in the southern part of the Tulsa Area are Jenks, Union, and Broken Arrow. BA is the largest of those three by far. Owasso (North of Tulsa) is another large and very nice school district. My daughters attended Union. Many of the friends and youth group members I worked with attended Jenks and Broken Arrow.
Just from that group, in my daughter's graduating class, we had 2 rhodes scholars (yes, they attended public schools - one in Jenks and one in BA). One of these went to school at Rice in Houston, and the other attended Stanford. Both were offered full scholarships at University of Oklahoma who works very hard to attract Rhodes Scholars. The students in that group typically had a least 2 years of Calculus related math by the time they graduated, and that would include differential equations and vector calculus. I realize that's not Ph. D. level, but it's quite good for HS I think, and maps quite favorably with the schools in Korea that I am familiar with.
Almost every year, there are students from those 3 schools who ace the ACT, SAT, and sometimes both. It usually makes a local news story when one does.
As public schools, these schools have to accomodate everyone, though. Not everyone will fit into that academic trac. There are multiple academic tracs and levels of classes in these schools. The AP classes and tracs are aimed at kids who have goals of attending elite universities. But there are also students who are not going to make it to college. There are tracs that they can attend as well.
Not all schools have the facilities for this. Rural schools are not going to be able to attract the teachers, and are not going to be able to provide the same level of facilities. They are also not going to be able to provide all the different levels of study for their students. Interestingly, my understanding of these schools is that they do quite well in fundamentals at least, though. The urban schools are the notorious schools - I won't deny that.
When I moved to California, we looked around the bay area for where we would settle in. The schools are the main thing I looked for. The district we settled in was again a very good school district. The schools were not as big as the ones I described in Tulsa, and the buildings and sports facilities weren't even in the same league as what they had in Tulsa. But the academic instruction and support programs were very, very good. Ther was a culture among the students there that strove for excellence. They are also able to place students into elite universities fairly regularly. Again, this is a public school.
That is the experience I have with public schools. They are not a joke. they provide quite well for the purpose for which they were created. Students who put in the effort can do quite well in them.
But what if they were a joke? Then whose responsibility is it really to provide for my kids' education? The answer, without any wavering is: It is MY responsibility. The public schools are simply a tool to help me educate my kids. When the public schools are helpful in that endeavor, then I will use them. When they are not, then it is my responsibility to recognize that, and provide something different for them. I have the freedom to do that. I can put them in private schools, or I can even home school them. Some people do both for different reasons (for example, one HS friend of mine home schooled her kids because ... she had 8 and thought that to be the most efficient way to provide for them).
I realize it's popular to say "Parents don't know or care about their kids' <insert child concern here>" but that has definitely NOT been my experience. Anytime you think that is true, try working with youth and teach them something off-base and see how many parents you have to deal with . I'm sure it is true of SOME parents, and again, that may help explain the difference in quality of different public schools.
Now as for my son ... he was very late learning to speak. They have names like "Auditory processing deficiency" and "Attention deficit disorder" for him, but I don't really think of them as disorders or deficiencies. He is quite smart, but he has developed on a different schedule, and learned in different ways than someone with a need to create a new category deemed was proper. He has had the attention he needed in public schools (although I was a REAL PITA to the educators ... see my remarks above about how parents care). I was never dissatisfied with the efforts of the schools or educators with him. But I had another idea ...
My son learns VERY well visually and kinesthetically, but did not understand the instructions when given verbally. I travel to some of the neatest places in the world, and I saw them as tools for education, and driving the interest he needed to develop his language. So we moved him into a program that deals with kids who are slow to learn to speak, and in this school, they work with me so that when I am getting ready to go to Juneau, he comes with me, visits the glaciers, gets to talk to the guides who show him picture of the glaciers 50 years ago, 20 years ago, and he can see it now. He learns all about glaciers, and then writing and presenting to his class about what he saw, he gets to expand his language skills as well. He has also visited the Volcanoes in Hawaii with me, he has dug for dinosaur bones in Montana, he has been to Labrea to learn about the pits and the animals that were found there, he has been to Yellowstone ... etc. In other words, he gets to see and do things that most students only get to read about in books.
His case is not typical, but my point is that I have the freedom to do that under our current educational system. I have a hard time finding that to be a joke.
And one last point ... when I talked about people coming from Asia to the US to go to school, I didn't mean just college. That does happen (and has been the case with many of my friends), but we have personally hosted students who have come from Korea to the US to go to grade school or secondary school. There are several among our friends families right now (although it is less with the slowed global economy) The parents thought this provided their kids with a better opportunity later in life. English is one of the biggest reasons they do this, but they would have to trust the educational system to do this, would they not? Some of these kids when we were in Oklahoma attended public schools. The good public schools in the bay area tend to be very full, so that is not common here. Some of these kids in both places attend private or parochial schools. So it seems to be my experience that parents in some of the most education-oriented societies in the world don't think the US educational system is a "joke."
I'll pause and let you respond to some of this, then we can continue if interest is maintained.
bxs, based entirely on the examples of school that you gave, I am guessing that the schools you went to are in New York City. Is that correct? And you gave examples you said were from your school experience. So how much of your opinion of public schools in the US are based on your experience? And with that flavoring your perception, what are you predisposed to believe when you look at other schools elsewhere? Would you agree that much like what someone else pointed out about us not being able to infer much about the state of climate science based on one bad surface station, we can't infer much about the overall state of eduction - public or private - based on one school, one neighborhood, or even one city (even if that is New York city)?
Let me introduce you to two other parts of the country, and a little about my experience there. I currently live in the San Francisco bay area, the 13 years prior to that, I lived in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area (Staying close to my Cherokee heritage). While in Tulsa, my older two daughters did most of their education. My younger daughter finished her high school in California. Both of these completed high school in public schools. My son goes to a private school, but that is another story all together.
I was very involved with my girls activities. This led me to work with youth a great deal while they were in school. I'm taking a break from that now.
In Tulsa, there are more expensive neighborhoods, and less expensive neighborhoods. As you can probably guess, that will correlate very tightly with "good" schools and "not good" schools. I don't know if the neighborhoods are more expensive because of schools, or the other way around. My guess is that it is a combination of both. So can you guess which schools the good teachers want to work at? And I would imagine that would allow them to be more selective.
The 3 biggest schools in the southern part of the Tulsa Area are Jenks, Union, and Broken Arrow. BA is the largest of those three by far. Owasso (North of Tulsa) is another large and very nice school district. My daughters attended Union. Many of the friends and youth group members I worked with attended Jenks and Broken Arrow.
Just from that group, in my daughter's graduating class, we had 2 rhodes scholars (yes, they attended public schools - one in Jenks and one in BA). One of these went to school at Rice in Houston, and the other attended Stanford. Both were offered full scholarships at University of Oklahoma who works very hard to attract Rhodes Scholars. The students in that group typically had a least 2 years of Calculus related math by the time they graduated, and that would include differential equations and vector calculus. I realize that's not Ph. D. level, but it's quite good for HS I think, and maps quite favorably with the schools in Korea that I am familiar with.
Almost every year, there are students from those 3 schools who ace the ACT, SAT, and sometimes both. It usually makes a local news story when one does.
As public schools, these schools have to accomodate everyone, though. Not everyone will fit into that academic trac. There are multiple academic tracs and levels of classes in these schools. The AP classes and tracs are aimed at kids who have goals of attending elite universities. But there are also students who are not going to make it to college. There are tracs that they can attend as well.
Not all schools have the facilities for this. Rural schools are not going to be able to attract the teachers, and are not going to be able to provide the same level of facilities. They are also not going to be able to provide all the different levels of study for their students. Interestingly, my understanding of these schools is that they do quite well in fundamentals at least, though. The urban schools are the notorious schools - I won't deny that.
When I moved to California, we looked around the bay area for where we would settle in. The schools are the main thing I looked for. The district we settled in was again a very good school district. The schools were not as big as the ones I described in Tulsa, and the buildings and sports facilities weren't even in the same league as what they had in Tulsa. But the academic instruction and support programs were very, very good. Ther was a culture among the students there that strove for excellence. They are also able to place students into elite universities fairly regularly. Again, this is a public school.
That is the experience I have with public schools. They are not a joke. they provide quite well for the purpose for which they were created. Students who put in the effort can do quite well in them.
But what if they were a joke? Then whose responsibility is it really to provide for my kids' education? The answer, without any wavering is: It is MY responsibility. The public schools are simply a tool to help me educate my kids. When the public schools are helpful in that endeavor, then I will use them. When they are not, then it is my responsibility to recognize that, and provide something different for them. I have the freedom to do that. I can put them in private schools, or I can even home school them. Some people do both for different reasons (for example, one HS friend of mine home schooled her kids because ... she had 8 and thought that to be the most efficient way to provide for them).
I realize it's popular to say "Parents don't know or care about their kids' <insert child concern here>" but that has definitely NOT been my experience. Anytime you think that is true, try working with youth and teach them something off-base and see how many parents you have to deal with . I'm sure it is true of SOME parents, and again, that may help explain the difference in quality of different public schools.
Now as for my son ... he was very late learning to speak. They have names like "Auditory processing deficiency" and "Attention deficit disorder" for him, but I don't really think of them as disorders or deficiencies. He is quite smart, but he has developed on a different schedule, and learned in different ways than someone with a need to create a new category deemed was proper. He has had the attention he needed in public schools (although I was a REAL PITA to the educators ... see my remarks above about how parents care). I was never dissatisfied with the efforts of the schools or educators with him. But I had another idea ...
My son learns VERY well visually and kinesthetically, but did not understand the instructions when given verbally. I travel to some of the neatest places in the world, and I saw them as tools for education, and driving the interest he needed to develop his language. So we moved him into a program that deals with kids who are slow to learn to speak, and in this school, they work with me so that when I am getting ready to go to Juneau, he comes with me, visits the glaciers, gets to talk to the guides who show him picture of the glaciers 50 years ago, 20 years ago, and he can see it now. He learns all about glaciers, and then writing and presenting to his class about what he saw, he gets to expand his language skills as well. He has also visited the Volcanoes in Hawaii with me, he has dug for dinosaur bones in Montana, he has been to Labrea to learn about the pits and the animals that were found there, he has been to Yellowstone ... etc. In other words, he gets to see and do things that most students only get to read about in books.
His case is not typical, but my point is that I have the freedom to do that under our current educational system. I have a hard time finding that to be a joke.
And one last point ... when I talked about people coming from Asia to the US to go to school, I didn't mean just college. That does happen (and has been the case with many of my friends), but we have personally hosted students who have come from Korea to the US to go to grade school or secondary school. There are several among our friends families right now (although it is less with the slowed global economy) The parents thought this provided their kids with a better opportunity later in life. English is one of the biggest reasons they do this, but they would have to trust the educational system to do this, would they not? Some of these kids when we were in Oklahoma attended public schools. The good public schools in the bay area tend to be very full, so that is not common here. Some of these kids in both places attend private or parochial schools. So it seems to be my experience that parents in some of the most education-oriented societies in the world don't think the US educational system is a "joke."
I'll pause and let you respond to some of this, then we can continue if interest is maintained.