Education reform is tough, complicated business. Read Ravitch’s earlier works for more cogent analysis. In those, she saw the value of reforms she’s now abandoned.
I’ve not watched Waiting for Superman because I can’t bring myself to see it. I’ve heard from too many who have and been emotionally devastated by its story.
I know that story from having worked with parents trying to get what’s best for their kids yet lacking the money to pull their kids from schools that just aren’t right for them. It doesn’t always mean the school’s bad. It’s just not right for every particular child.
Why we continue to insist that children’s education be limited by geography is beyond me. Our current system is based on a model dating back to xenophobic times in the mid 1850s when nativists wanted to control the populace from being influenced by new, mostly Catholic, immigrants. That’s when the first laws requiring school attendance were passed, followed soon after by laws stating which schools children MUST attend (public ones that were drenched in a nondenominational brand of Christianity with hymn singing, praying and Bible reading as part of the curriculum, just not the Douay Bible Catholics favored), and which ones would be free. Prior to the passage of such laws, some communities funded a variety of schools.
When Catholics responded by setting up their own schools where they could use their Bible, prayers and hymns, the nativists tried pushing even further, by attempting to make private schools entirely illegal. Oregon voted to do just that in the early part of the last century. The US Supreme Court struck down that nonsense. (As an aside, a group that started in the 1940s and fights school choice programs in courts today was originally called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State; they didn’t drop the “Protestants and” part until the 1970s.)
It’s well past time we struck down the rest of that 1800s school model and opened the doors to individual opportunity through all kinds of schools – public, private, charter, cyber, etc. And let the money follow the child to the school that works best for him or her instead of forcing parents to pay a financial penalty for choosing a school other than the local public one.
