Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article about a documentary on public education and charter schools. The film maker, Madeleine Sackler, started out with the idea to make a documentary about four families participating in New York's Harlem Success Academy's lottery for places at their successful charter school. She came to the project without strong opinions about school choice. She says:
Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story, a vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise.
During the filming, she and her crew came across what looked like a protest against Harlem Success Academy outside a school building the charter was seeking to use. From the article:
They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.' But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.)
Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?"
One day k-12 public education will look completely different than it does today. It'll resemble our university system with students and parents able to choose from any number of ways to get an education. We'll use the internet and e-books and our homes. Small schools will open that can cater to specific interests and needs. It'll become truly democratic and responsive to its customers.
Gone will be the common student experience of attending assigned schools which pretty much all work the same. But in its place, students and parents will become responsible for guiding their own educations. To me anyway, the idea of education as something one participates in is much more exciting than being given a school district and a bus number.
"Timberland" Esta é a última anúncios, um cabelo azul de Katy Perry estreia sportswear colocar nas ruas de Los Angeles,
Posted by: Timberland Botas | 09/16/2012 at 11:13 PM