The school I’m referring to is StarShine Academy in Phoenix (www.starshineacademy.org) who uses individualized learning plans and other innovative techniques to create a happy productive student through the development of every childs mind, body, spirit, health, wealth, and happiness. Holding the child’s fate in a lottery is so symbolic of the state of our school system. Only the wealthy, and lucky get the chance for a good education. Spreading quality charter schools through franchise opportunities is the only way to reach every child from coast to coast.

StarShine’s curriculum works, which is why StarShine works closely with the United Nations and their Millennium Development Goals. As individual schools around the country work tirelessly to change our broken educational system, they also need support from our government. Hopefully this movie will wake them up, put their individual interests aside and work to make a difference.

One problem I have with this theory is that it will not change the fact that 87% of my students are on free/reduced lunch. It will not change the fact that many students are unable/unwilling to speak English. It will not change the fact that schools have turned into psychological centers for disturbed kids. It will not change the fact that schools have to take responsibility for students getting proper medical attention, which frequently includes proper hygiene.

With this in mind, I would like to also mention that I have a double Master’s degree to teach 7th and 8th grade students. In addition to having to do all the work to achieve this level of education, I also had to pay for it myself. When we talk about “school reform” I think part of the conversation needs to include parent education because the only qualification for having a child is a penis and a vagina.

It seems to make a compelling argument that teachers are at the root of all of our educational woes in this country, but it fails to dole out the much deserved serving of criticism to the proponents of No Child Left Behind who instituted “unreasonable demands” upon local school entities and promulgated a toxic “culture of testing” that would irrevocable harm special needs students, children whose first language is other than English and students who do not test well for whatever reason according to educational historian, Diane Ravitch.

Read Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System:How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education” before you enter the theater.

I did my pre-service hours in a remedial algebra classroom at a school like the one in The Wire. As an outsider being suddenly immersed in their desperate, cruel, scary, hungry, and dangerous world, it was pretty obvious that improving their algebra skills were the least of their problems.

Which is not to say that I will give up. But I will also not just shut up about the necessity of improving their social conditions as well.

You can test him or her all you want, but an exhausted, frightened, hungry child has already been “left behind.”

The career change of my dreams is from university teaching to junior high teaching, as the best foundation for what–and how– I teach has to be laid much earlier than college.

Please keep writing, so that I can keep reading.

Second, as a math teacher myself I shudder when I see this as I suspect that this will not mean more art, more cooking, more school gardens or more time learning how to act locally, but rather I fear it will mean more algebra, more trig, more AP classes, more facts, more accceleration, less thinking.

Dan has inspired me to find ways to bring something of value within a content area that generally does not serve students. But that job becomes harder if the pressure is directed at ‘more’ math, more topics, etc.

Charters serve to concentrate a reasonable number of highly motivated children in a school building. Then, when they get results, it’s because the invisible hand of the market has unleashed innovation and glory in education. It’s never because they drain the better students from an area and cause the rest of the kids to be divided up among the neighboring zones. And when I say better, I mean more motivated.

If the lottery is not enough of a selection mechanism, a principal can require an essay, an interview, a parent interview, orientation sessions, what have you. If some lazy child did manage to win the lottery, they certainly will not write an essay. If a child with uninterested parents does manage to win the lottery, their parents will certainly not show up for an interview.

The flip side of this approach is to pin the blame entirely on bad parenting and lazy, dumb kids. I hear that one a lot from bad teachers, almost never from good ones (and from some administrators, too). But I also hear it from those who claim that given the “poor raw material” kids from poverty and their families represent, we’re wasting precious resources (particularly of the monetary kind) on schools in these sorts of neighborhoods, communities, districts, etc. I can almost hear the voice of Alistair Sim from the 1951(?) version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

There’s plenty of blame to go around, of course, but it’s not merely the obvious folks and institutions that need to be targeted. The genius of American classism and racism is its ability to deflect blame on everyone but those with the greatest vested interest in maintaining the status quo, keeping the majority in poverty and ignorance, and ensuring that the have-nots and barely-haves fight amongst themselves for the few crumbs that come their way. US public education gets the blame for every failure, real or imagined, but NEVER gets credit for a single success. That says it all right there.