There is a great debate going on regarding how education should be done. There are people advocating for private schools, charter schools, public schools and home-schools. Each of the different options has merits, but they all also fall short of the utopia of schooling that many advocates of each are claiming.
I am a public school teacher. I taught for five years in a Gates-funded public high school and I have also taught, albeit briefly, in a private school. I am also a mother of two elementary school children. I hold a Master’s of Education degree in Mathematics, a dance minor, and I am a National Board Certified teacher. Education is my passion, my privilege, and my responsibility.
Private schools and charter schools are wonderful places to teach and learn. The typical class size is small, the students tend to be very well-behaved and there is a great deal of parental support and involvement in the process. This isn’t surprising considering the students had to apply and be accepted or “chosen” to participate. They are there, most often, by choice. Their families value education enough to invest time and money into the child’s schooling.
So what is the down side of these wonderful places? It is simple: there are not enough private and charter schools that are accessible to ALL students. Private school tuition is typically beyond the average American family’s budget, especially if the family has more than one child. Charter schools have caps on the numbers of students they can accept. Another drawback to charter schools is some of them are run not by people that know anything about child development and curriculum design, but by corporations whose intrinsic motivation is measured in dollar signs. Schools are assembly lines where individuality is squashed in favor of conforming to corporate desires.
Public schools today are in crisis. This crisis stems from the growing population of students, many of whom come from poverty, pouring into classrooms where budgets are being slashed and teachers being let go. Classrooms are overcrowded and understaffed. Students come to class often with little or no support at home, often as the first in their family to attend high school. A growing number of students do not speak English, so special teachers are being hired to tend to the special needs of this population while regular classroom teachers are being cut. Teachers are being targeted when students fail to perform on standardized tests, but the parents and the students themselves are not held accountable in any way. Critical thinking is being cast aside in favor of training students to make the “best” choice of a, b, c, or d. The best thing going for public schools is that they are filled with professionals trained in current teaching methods that care deeply about children.
Home-schooling is a growing trend. Many parents know the situation in public schools is not a good fit for their children and are choosing to create home-schools to teach the children as they see fit. While some of these parents are well-educated themselves, some are not. Sometimes these children are insulated (isolated?) from the world so much that they are under prepared for a world that doesn’t fit in their framework. While home-schooling is great in theory, the practice can and often does fall short of the parents’ and students’ goals. When a home-school setting fails, the children are then dumped back into the public school system where it falls on the public school teacher to catch the child up to where his/her peers are working. I would love to be able to home-school my own children. Unfortunately, if I quit my paying job to do so, we would have to be homeless. The trade-off is impossible.
So what are we, as a nation, to do? How do we best educate the next generation? Technology is changing so fast that no one school can keep up. Children will not value education unless their parents do. There is no simple solution to this question. It will certainly take efforts by all of us to prepare today’s children for the future. The African proverb still holds true: “It takes a village to raise a child.”