Excellent Reads

What experience do you have to back up any of your ideas?

Mostly a handful of books I've read, documentaries I've watched, and discussions with teachers in my family. For democratic learning, I cite Sir Ken Robinson's You, Your Child, and School (I think, I read a few books around that time), and for independent learning, I cite myself and my friends, who were perennially bored and much preferred to just teach ourselves throughout K-12 school (college was great because I could skip classes if I knew it was going to be a waste of time). The main saving grace for me was a concurrent enrollment program at the local community college, so I got my AA a couple months before my high school diploma.

And yes, the Arbitur system in Germany (I never remember what it's called). I see so many kids drop out here around 10-12th grade because they feel like school is pointless, and some years later they end up in the trades. My school opened up a machine shop, and I think that reduced high school dropouts some (not sure, I've since moved and never bothered checking before/after stats).

My current district doesn't offer as many of those programs, though they do have a few classes here and there (e.g. a programming class as an elective). My current school district is considering a split (we're the largest in the state, by a lot) largely to "keep costs local," and my main concern is that we'd have even less opportunity for specialized programs because each school needs to be a complete unit. We also have charter schools, but those are only available for privileged kids, which doesn't really solve the wider problem of poor test scores (privileged kids would likely succeed regardless due to parental support. We do have concurrent enrollment at a local university, which is nice, but that only helps college-bound kids.

the school system segregates children based on scores for their elementary and middle schools

We kind of do. I'm in the US (Utah specifically, grew up in WA), and we absolutely do a form of segregation. My kids go to a charter school (so not sure how public school works), and they split kids roughly by ability, and have them learn independently if they're ahead of the class (both my kids are). They have a separate class as well for kids who are at the top (we call it "compass club," which both my kids attend). Where I grew up, we had a special program called "STEP" for "highly capable" K-5 students (my friend was invited, I wasn't) where kids are bussed from around the district to a single school, and we had "honors" classes in 6-12, which basically taught material a year ahead for math, and went more in depth for humanities classes (english and history). We also did and do state testing pretty much every year to determine outcomes, which impacts funding for schools.

I think we should take that a step further and split schools based on teaching style. I have three elementary schools and a charter school within 3 miles of my house, but they all offer basically the same approach to education, each being a little silo. We chose the charter school (enrollment is based on a lottery) because our assigned school had a crappy principle who seemed to scare away teachers (most teachers stayed for 1-2 years and moved on), whereas other parents moved their kids to one of the other schools in the area. So at least in my neighborhood, only about 30% stayed with the assigned school, and the other 70% have to take their kids themselves, which is incredibly wasteful. And I'm in a very privileged neighborhood, the less privileged kids in the boundaries are basically stuck where they're at.

The bus system clearly isn’t preventing magnet schools from existing so that’s not the issue.

No, but it's preventing access to those magnet schools. Given the choice between a free bus and having to drop off and pick up your kid every day, which do you think a busy family is going to choose? What ends up happening, at least in my area, is that privileged kids get to take advantage of those programs, while poorer kids don't. Some areas will bus between those schools, but that's hardly an efficient system.

there are only so many seats at each campus

If a certain program is popular, your options are:

• expand the school/add teachers
• transition other schools in the area to that system
• increase class sizes
• lottery system

Denying kids is a temporary problem and probably only relevant in the first couple years it's offered while teachers skill up to teach whatever that program is. So I recommend doing the last two as much as possible before the first two. If the program is successful, the other two will happen naturally as schools rebalance to meet shifting needs.

how do you propose these individual schools get funding

Funding is always an issue. In general, funding should be applied based on need, and teachers reallocated and paid based on ability. So if you're teaching disadvantaged kids in broken homes, that teacher should get paid a lot more than a teacher largely teaching independent learners, and perhaps school hours should be extended for the former and reduced for the latter (the latter probably has support at home). Teachers would fight for the role they'd prefer (i.e. lower pay and easier students, or higher pay and more challenging students/longer hours).

which schools aren’t going to have sports fields?

Honestly, most schools wouldn't have sports fields. Ideally, most of these would be remitted to the cities as parks, and after school sports would fall under the city's purview (most cities already do this anyway). I really liked after-school sports, but it's hardly required for schools to fund and only really benefits a relatively small percentage of the student body. They could be subsidized for lower-income kids as well, and transportation for competition w/ other teams would be handled through mass transit.

That's how it worked where my SO grew up (E. Asia), so I don't see why we couldn't do that here.

there’s a lot of moving parts and shared resources

Certainly, and as an outsider, I don't have that larger context. My aim here is to propose an alternative to our current system that better serves the needs of kids instead of trying to force them all into the same mold. Oh, and also gives more control to teachers, as well as offers more opportunities for experimentation.

Things like "no child left behind" and "common core" push hard on that "one-size fits all" approach, which I really think does our kids a disservice. We should have a "one size fits most" approach by default, with different options available for the rest of the kids.