Teachers Union Opposes Virtual K-8 Charter School 772
theodp writes "'You can't sit a child in front of a computer and expect him to learn things he needs to succeed in society,' said unimpressed Chicago Teachers Union president Marilyn Stewart of the Chicago Virtual Charter School, which will open to Chicago elementary school students this fall if approved by the state board of education."
Oh really? (Score:2, Informative)
These [japanese-online.com] sites [monash.edu.au] teach [yousei-ziploc.com] you [learn-japanese.info] basic [freejapaneselessons.com] Japanese [wikipedia.org] if [wikipedia.org] you [about.com] study [about.com] enough. [about.com]
Parents just have to watch to make sure their children aren't looking at porn instead of studying and help them along.
Like home school (Score:4, Informative)
And this doesn't speak to the socialization aspect. Half of what is taught in school isn't just the three R's. The other half is how to become a responsible adult functioning in a society where you must interact with others. Sheltering kids from the outside world does not teach them that.
It can work. (Score:5, Informative)
I know that homeschooling works, and works well, because my daughter is homeschooled. She scores very high on achievement tests. She is so socialized (outside of public school), we have to sometimes limit her socializing in order to spend non-educational time with her. When she started high school level curricula, we associated ourselves with an umbrella school for advise, transcripting, focused tutoring, etc. This took some of the anxiety off of us when we started considering college prep issues.
This Chicago effort appears to merge the homeschooling concept with oversight by the city's education system. This closely parallels what we have found to be a very successful combination.
Re:Online Universities (Score:2, Informative)
I think you should disregard all degrees, but beside that, why would you disregard online universities?
I've gone to physical university and I'm currently going to an online university, and I can tell you it's a hell of a lot more work and learning in the online one.
The classes don't have 500 people in them for one, unlike the physical university I went to. The professor actually interacts with us personally.
It also costs about 5 times more to go online, on the down side.
200-300$ month? try $2000-6000 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Informative)
To be very honest with any comments like this, and comments that bash schools online, everyone should take the time to visit a site called Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow [ecotohio.org]. If it wasn't for this possibility, students that made a few bad mistakes, young teenage parents, and socially impaired individuals that I knew growing up would have just ended up dropping out all together and getting their GED. Instead, they got their high school diploma.
To anyone who thinks it isn't possible to sit in front of a computer at home to go to school, and actually learn, my sister was one of those people who graduated from Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. I have never seen such a determined school in all my years of moving, relocating, and some REALLY bad experiences with normal schools. When I graduated back in the day, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow JUST Came out, and I wish every day it would have came out a few years earlier.
The importance of having the option to elect out of a public school system, and to go to school online, is the best thing that has ever came to Ohio. For those individuals that can't handle the daily routine of public school systems, and the people who needed the extra help and support, that basically ALL School systems should cater to anyways, ECOT Is there for them here. It is a real school in Columbus, and they even have events, field trips, prom, graduation, and support staff that will work with you for at least several years after you graduate, to make sure you have someone to go to, if you needed that help.
We all know what kind of things happen in a public school system, and we know what can happen in a private school system. People can be so mean at times, and can knock other peoples self-esteem to no end. With ECOT, the people that I knew that used it, had their confidence boosted up, their self-esteem up, and they admitted to learning more at ecot than they ever did.
So think about that, when any of you take cracks at a Electronic Classroom... Cause if you farted around, they took their learning experience seriously, and normally you were suspended for not doing your homework and course work online. They were the only people to actually care for those, who felt they didn't fit in, and lost their self-esteem when others knocked it down. All Electronic Online Classrooms should be molded like ECOT.
Homeschooling (Score:5, Informative)
The most common question we get about it is "what about social skills". A lot of people who homeschool make very conscious efforts to make sure their kids receive social skills. We are involved in co-ops, we do field trips with other homeschool kids, there are sporting activities, and he has other kids in the neighborhood. The best argument I heard about schools & social skills was this: teachers don't want you to be social during classes. When you were growing up were you allowed to talk in class? Of course not. You talked between classes and at lunch. Most of the social skills you received were not tought by a teacher but interaction with other kids. This can be gained outside of school too.
Yes, my son does behave different than some other kids. Some things are good and some are bad. He doesn't really understand that some questions are very awkward to ask in public, he tends to interrupt, and his patience isn't the best. On the other hand, he can talk to any adult much more easily than I ever could and he naturally asks questions if he doesn't understand something. When interacting with other kids I don't really notice a difference. He interacts with his public school & homeschool friends the same way and they play the same games.
Virtual schools have advantages & disadvantages except you get some outside support. Some parents really need that extra support because they don't feel comfortable being on their own.
The biggest benefits to non-traditional learning are the ability to go at your own pace and to change the teaching method if it doesn't work. When we started math with my son we got a really cool math program. It had blocks and videos as well as worksheets. It looked really great to me. He absolutely hated it. We tried for a few weeks and gave up. We switched to another program which had very bright and colorful worksheets but no blocks or videos. He responded much better to it and was able to learn the material much easier. Learning at your own pace is good for him too. There is no being "left behind". Until he understands the subject we don't go to the next.
That all being said, homeschooling isn't for everyone. Some kids just don't respond and need more structure. Some parents don't want the responsibility or can't be home to be the teacher. Even in virtual schools the idea isn't just "sit them in front of a computer and you are done". There is other non-computer stuff in any program I've ever seen. I can't comment on the quality of the Chicago program, but I'd imagine it is the same way. The majority of time isn't computer related. I'm sure it will be less flexible and less "go at your own pace", but that isn't necessarily bad because some kids really need the structure. It depends on the child.
Also remember that things change. The parent or the child may decide to go back to traditional schooling. People and situations change. You can always switch. All 50 states have laws permitting homeschooling. Some are more "interesting" than others, but they all allow it.
There is also one other myth I'd like to dispell. Other than social skills the second most common question is about religion. Not everyone is a religous zelot who homeschools. I'm not even remotely religious. Lots of people do it because they feel it is the best opportunity for their children and not to shelter or block their kids from the outside world.
By the way, another thing which helped convince me that it isn't a bad idea was the fact that a lot of homeschoolers are ex-teachers. You would be amazed how many ex-teachers there are doing this. Every ex-teacher I talk to says that public schools waste time and they spent the vast majority of their time on a few kids in a class.
Anecdotal counterevidence (Score:2, Informative)
I'm ACing because I don't want what I say to be misconstrued by future students>
I am a faculty at a relatively large but academically undistinguished Midwestern university. I teach (mainly) American literature and critical theory (philosophy to non-specialists). In the 3 years I have been here, I specifically recall teaching one home-schooled student in my advanced undergraduate introduction to the major. This student, let's call her Lauren, was insanely intelligent, able to internalize and understand high-level philosophical concepts with ease. She had an excellent and, seemingly, intuitive understanding of how to incorporate arguments into her own lines thinking and instead of summarizing ideas she knew how to critique them constructively.
Her abilities were of the kind that I see in advanced later undergraduates and/or early graduate students at a top university. Two years later, I find out that Lauren dropped out for a few terms because she was having "a rough time" dealing with classroom environments and applying herself to required subjects that do not interest her.
In other words, Lauren was having a difficult time to the demands of an institution.
Was it the fault of homeschooling? My guess is yes but partially so. If she had been exposed to institutions more public than her family home she would have more experience excelling at tasks not of her choosing. I don't know that her homeschooling indulged her more than a public institution would have but the possibility is certainly there.
To round off this anecdote, when Lauren came to my office to ask for advice, she was an absolute nervous wreck, visibly shaken by the challenges of socializing in college, reeking of her compulsive chain-smoking. In my class I always validated her opinions and emphasized the points where she was correct. However, she was so much more capable in terms of raw talent/cognitive preparation than her publicly-schooled peers that she expressed impatience and mild arrogance at times. And, believe me, her peers noticed this.
While homeschooling can provide excellent results in terms of academics, it is very important that such results are tempered with socialization that, yes, teaches these exceedingly intelligent/capable people how to be patient with their less capable peers and how to make intellectual contributions with grace.
Re:Not the best idea (Score:5, Informative)
There are 3 levels: Gifted, Magnet, and normal. To get into gifted, you have to test highly (they administer tests to 5 years olds, no kidding) - only 1 in 40 to 1 in 100 that apply get in. To get into a magnet school, you have to be lucky - it is a random lottery (about 1 in 10), though you can apply to any that you want (unfortunately, it is heavily weighted by race - so if you are white you are virtually guaranteed to be accepted into a school in an area of town that would literally get you killed). The normal schools are done by geography - and there is only one that you are assigned to. These are the school with guns+kids - even though you have to pass through metal detectors to get in.
Almost everyone that can afford it goes to a private school, or the magnet and gifted schools. So the normal school students self select for parents that don't care or are destitute. (If the parents cared enough presumably they would move into a better district, or at least lie!) If you look at the school statistics, what happens is that all the kids do just fine until about the 4th grade. Presumably, at this point some of the kids get into drugs and violence - the grades, test scores, etc. all take a nose dive (from everyone, including african american kids achieving near 90% - to the african american kids achieving less than 50% in one year).
Most of the information is available online - I actually know some of the people in the Chicago Public School system management, and they are good people really trying to get things fixed, but there is too much politics, too little parental involvement, and too little money.
Re:Not the best idea (Score:3, Informative)
I have actualy. In fact, just the other day I met a kid at my workplace who was with his dad. Turns out the kid was being home schooled and the father was there to pick up some supplies and get some information about what he would need to teach his kid some video production / editing. The kid was probably the most well mannered, nice and appropriate kid I've ever met. To tell the truth his demeanor was more appropriate than 95% of the adults I work with on a daily basis. If that's what home schooling produces, then more power to the home schoolers.
The Unions (Score:3, Informative)
1) More power for the union.
2) More money for the union.
They are against new testing. They are against non-testing based instruction. They are against charter schools. They are against charter schools even if it means no schools. (Charters were willing to set up in New Orleans long before the public schools would have been able to operate. The unions fought against them, in favor of no schools at all.) The unions are against any changes to the tenure system. The unions are against anything proposed by or endorsed by the conservatives. The unions are against Wal-Mart. The unions are against the high cost of living. The unions are against forcing the teachers to get technology traning. The unions are against the schools spending more of their budgets on technology (and less on teachers). They are against home schooling. They are against school funding cuts. They are against property tax increases.
And they support teachers retiring at 55 with 25 years of service. They expect to work 25 years, only about 1/3 of their lives, and have the rest of us taxpayers who work from 16 to 65+, including summers, to support them. (Earlier retirement means hiring more teachers, which means more union members and more dues paid.)
Taking a Look at the CVCS Materials (Score:2, Informative)
After RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot, but...), and going over the Chicago Virtual Charter School materials, I can't say I'm terribly impressed with either one. For starters:
However:
Overall, it looks like the CVCS might be a tolerable interim solution for parents who only have access to desperately bad public schools, but certainly not a replacement for even middle-of-the-road traditional public education, let alone a serious attempt to explore the potential of virtual schools.
Re:privatization of schools (Score:3, Informative)
Because in the other countries the school systems are not required to take every single student all the way through 12th grade, no matter the school. Students are tested periodically to even get into the schools. Highschools have entrance tests and they only accept the top X students. Don't get a high enough scoore? You can't go to that school. Try one of the less prestigious ones. Get low enough? You're going to one that only has blue collar tracks for study.
Oh, and these ARE the public schools. Also, most countries in Europe only provide test scores to the more prestigious schools. Where as in the US the numbers are from a cross section of all the schools.
Re:privatization of schools (Score:3, Informative)
From the school district. You've heard of school vouchers right? The idea is families decide where their child can get the best education and the government pays for it (up to what it would have otherwise cost them in a public school). And before you start saying that some schools wouldn't teach anything, the laws can be written in such a way that the schools would still have to be accredited by the state to be eligible to accept vouchers.
Re:But of course you can (Score:3, Informative)
Currently as in 1950?
In my state, which is fairly conservative, kids are taught that no matter how they act and think, there is nothing wrong with it, that if you are bad in class, that they can and will do nothing to correct it (because parents will sue them), and that no matter what you do wrong, it is somebody else's fault. So in fact, I would have to say that my biggest problem with public schools is EXACTLY the opposite of what your biggest problem with them is.
The schools in my area also openly accept advertising, send kids to presentations by commercial interests which then send home flyers with the kids for signing up for various commercial programs. One time, they even let some newspaper subscription subcontracter conman come in and sign up kids to sell papers for him which benefited them at several cents per hour.
Re:privatization of schools (Score:3, Informative)
They don't, which you'd realize if you did any actual research on the topic. Traditional school systems are failing *everywhere*; it just so happens that the U.S. school system shortfalls are more widely publicized, and U.S. citizens tend to be far more critical than their counterparts in Europe and Asia.
Max
Homeschool ignorance relieved here! (Score:3, Informative)
http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html [learninfreedom.org]
http://www.pregnancy.org/article.php?sid=189 [pregnancy.org]
I look for some studies that showed public shooling was better, but there aren't any.
Re:But of course you can (Score:4, Informative)
Virtually every single person in this article thread, and in TFA itself, is using non-scientific evidence, especially anecdotes. See the post further down by some AC about "Lauren" the college dropout he taught who was home-schooled. It therefor stands that, if nobody is linking studies/research at all, one anecdote is as good as another. Your only valid counterpoint would be a scientifically credited link; as it stands my direct experience is more valid than your uninformed opinion (neither of us is being scientific).
What proof is there anyway? Even if you could study the students (this is being done BTW, my brother was tracked by one such study), then any data gathered over the last few decades will be skewed by the number of religion based home schooling.
As for comparisons between the two of us, we're damn similar people. Close to the same intelligence, similar academic performance (I test better, he get's his assignments done more often), similar personality. Why do I dislike people far more than him? I was taught froma very early age that people are scum. He never learned that lesson.
However, learning that lesson did me no practical good, whereas ignorance has actually benefitted him. We have wound up at about the same place in life as well, so arguements that I must have a better job/higher education/whatever don't fly.
And even if he were more gregarious than me, all you've proved is that, in our case, which system we went through had no positive or negative impact on our lives. Ie, home schooled kid fairs no worse than public schooled kid when all other variables are as close to identical as possible. Which would still be an arguement in favour of home schooling.
Re:But of course you can (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Better to end up as Ralph, even Piggy than as J (Score:1, Informative)
Re:But of course you can (Score:1, Informative)
Also, to be perfectly honest, the part of the school system that they can help to fix through lobbying is not the only thing they're worried about. The hard truth is that a substantial, if not the majority, portion of the school experience—and consequently the overall quality of the school—is decided by the students attending it. Regardless of how successfully they are in lobbying for school reform, if the parents of their childrens' peers do not also care as much about the education of their children, their child is very likely to have an exceedingly poor experience.
I went to one of the worst public high schools in my state—and my state consistently ranks among the worst 5 of all states in the US on almost any metric you care to name, from teen pregnancy, to standardized test scores, to average literacy—and I can tell you that there is no way that you can pin it all on the teachers and the rest of the educational system. It's nowhere near perfect, and could definitely use some serious reform, but attempting to blame all of the underperformance on the teachers and administration is both grossly unfair and cowardly. You may not have explicitly stated that you blamed the educational system for all of public schooling's failings, but that is the implied assumption if you believe that it's even possible for home schooling parents to fix public schools through lobbying for reform. It doesn't work like that. You would not only need to reform the schools, but the other parents as well, which is not necessarily something that you even have the right to do.
In contrast to my high school experience, I ended up in college at Harvard. I also dropped in on some lectures at my local state university, and attending summer courses there during high school. While there are many amazing professors at Harvard, the massive difference in quality of education (let me assure you from firsthand experience, the difference is quite real) is mainly due to the difference in qualities of the respective student bodies.
Now don't get me wrong, the people in my high school weren't bad as human beings. My best friends to this day happen to be the ones I went to high school with, for instance, and I strongly disagree with the ethical beliefs of many of my classmates from Harvard. However, there is absolutely no question that the fact that my peers at Harvard were dead serious about their goals dramatically increased the quality of the educational environment. On the other hand, in high school, and while I went to the public university, I managed to learn in spite of my peers rather than from them.
If/when I have kids of my own I intend to send them to public schools because I learned many important life lessons there. However, I have absolutely no illusions that they will receive an education from a public school, regardless of how much I might lobby for reform, so I'll be seeing to that personally.