Waiting For Superman...

[Houston]

Private School FTW

[dope]

By reading the replies in this thread I can tell no one has seen the film. Half of it is about the failings of the public system while the other half is about publicly funded schools not tied to the unions and school districts are succeeding.

oh i watched it and found it to be no better than a micheal moore documentary. its slanted to his point of view and tells a story he believes in. anything outside of that motive is left behind.

please tell me where the movie gives a solution outside of "fire bad teachers" and "charter schools are awesome"

by copying what works at a charter school into a public school you leave out the fact that most students in a charter school have parents that care and push their children to learn. so their learning ability is higher than that of an inner city child who's living in a single parent household who's working 2 jobs to make it. so when you copy over their teaching tactics or in classroom activities you leave out the fact that some kids just aren't up to par when it comes to that subject or even that class level. and lets just completely ignore (like the director did) that only 17% of charter schools outperform their competing public schools and a whopping 38% are worse.

and then the tenure aspect you touched on, getting tenure doesn't mean untouchable or job for life as most people would make it out to be. those people still have to be reviewed and can and will be fired for poor performance. just removing "bad teachers" doesn't fix the problem. you remove all bad teachers and replace them with capable and caring teachers. well guess what they still don't have the resources they need, the support system for new or frustrated teachers, and a far better curriculum.

imo the only thing this movie can successfully do is get conversation started, which is what we are doing here. we are talking about it and trying to find solutions, instead you seem to just wanna shout from the mountains that this movie is gospel and that the only way for our education system to change and succeed is to follow what his slanted movie has stated.

[dope]

also lets remember that many of the statistics that come out about how bad our education system is failing is drug down by inner city schools that have a high drop out rate and low test scores. that's more of an economic factor than education. poor inner city's have very low property taxes which means less funding into those schools, which mean less resources. you'll notice on that map of "drop-out" factories, there was only 4 (maybe 5) in montana where i live and only 1 in south dakota where i grew up. well the one in sd is on a very poor reservation. same as in montana. the other 3 or 4 are all located on very rural and poor farming communities.

by finding ways to make charter schools, succeeding schools, and inner city schools on a more even playing field you'd see test numbers start to rise.

and those hcz schools are funded privately to about 2/3 of their costs, which is HUGE in getting not only classroom resources but good school lunches, doctors, dentists, playgound, gym equipment etc etc etc which all go towards stimulating and nurturing a childs mind.

[JeremyHight]

By reading the replies in this thread I can tell no one has seen the film. Half of it is about the failings of the public system while the other half is about publicly funded schools not tied to the unions and school districts are succeeding.

I just watched it today and I found this laughable. I hate to break this to you, but when you are talking about charter/private schools, of course they are going to be better than public schools. Even with the same funding and changes to tenure, I can guarantee you they will be better. Do you know why?

Children in charter schools normally have to apply. This does not mean these schools are only taking the best and brightest, that isn't true. It does mean though that children are not automatically placed in those schools. Instead parents have to file a form, call the district office, or some other small step to make sure that their child gets into the selection process for the school (which is normally just a lottery if there are too many kids). What does this mean?

The average kid isn't going to go and the below average kids with little to no parent support are definitely not going to go. Those small little steps are either unknown to them or not worth the effort. So charter schools are almost always better than their traditional public school counterpart, which have students automatically placed in their classrooms.

Charter schools are definitely producing, but if the average public school had the same admission process, I bet the results would be almost identical.