How the local/national dichotomy plays out is not at all clear to me. Local control often means focusing on group interests, not the individual’s. It is harder for an indicidualist to find his special niche in a small group of like-minded people than in a large group, where variety becomes the norm. I’, concerned that local control could become local group think.
Vocational training is a great idea, but if it becomes the norm (i.e. best funded) in a community, the kids with high intellectual potential would be cut off at the knees.

I tend to think that a system focused on developing an individual’s potential would serve the country best. So when there is talk of choice, we need to look at what true choices the children have.

Does local control also mean local funding? Since our shools are largely funded by real estate taxes, we see the catastrophic disparity between wealthy and poor school districtis.

I’m not as negative as this sounds. I bring up some questions, because it’s important to ask the questions before committing. When it’s too late, it’s too late.

That’s why I urge caution before jumping on any one bandwagon. There is a lot of experimentation going on, I’m glad to note. It takes many, many years, however, before the full impact of this apporach or that approach can be realistically assessed.

This is one issue where I’m very much on the side of state and even local control. The level of education is tied to many things; demands of the marketplace, expectations (or not) of higher education, and a whole host of variables about the students…are they low, working, middle or upper class? What race? Are they fully American or is there a large immigrant sector? What sort of immigrants? Are they part of a close-knit community or are they bussed in from far away? Rural or urban? High crime or low?

The very morally right insistance that all children are born with the same potential has mutated into all children can be educated the same way with the same strategies. This is fallacy, by the time a kid is in school he or she already has a load of baggage, good or bad, that must be acknowledged and dealt with.

Another thing I see as rather negative is the absence of vocational training. Not everyone is made for college, and some training in carpentry, electricity, cooking and other skills would be very useful to such students. But again we are dealing with the pretty fiction of pretending that every student is going to be a doctor, and that admitting otherwise is condemning them to lower status. As if there were something shameful about being a carpenter.

Jim, I’ve been a student of both the US system and one European system and at least in my case we had more vacation days here in Spain than in the US. Spain is officially Catholic and we have a whole host of saints days, in addition to Christmas, Easter and the summer months. On the other hand it’s not at all uncommon, especially in High School, to fail courses and have to study in summer to pass exams in September, or risk repeating a term (if you fail 3 or more) or carrying them over to the next term. In the US, you had to be asleep the whole term to not pass, if only with a D.

Right off the bat, I would contest the notion that American students K-12 have ever been better educated than say, European students. We have always had a different paradigm, emphasizing developing thinking over expanding factual knowledge. The American ideal has been a well-rounded child developing as an individual, for better or worse. It has long been the rule of thumb that to gain equivalency with a HS graduate from Europe, an American needs to complete 2 years of college. The pay off was more creativity, so it was believed.

The world changed, making higher technical demands of young adults, at the same time that the deficiencies in our system became starkly evident.
This is made even more complex by the deficiencies in our society as a whole: high crime and incarceration rates, poor health care, segregated communities, etc. etc.
In many ways, the problems with education reflect much broader problems, and to treat the subject of education separately, though necessary, presents a bigger challenge because of this.

I welcome the debates and the experimentation with charter schools. Solutions that are durable require some patience to develop, however. Jumping to conclusions before enough time has elapsed to study all the repercussions would be a mistake, IMO.
Some problens and repercussions don;t crop up right away. Some questions about what we expect of schools have not even been asked yet.
I know that in NY, the results of experimentation have produced some great results, but at the same time have led to badly understood results for the ciry as a whole.
So, experiment, but then digest, before committing wholesale to any one answer for every child and every community.

I think more needs to asked of parents and the students themselves. Instead we seem to expect the gov’t to somehow provide not only the institutions but the motivation to use them.

Does the book deal with the fact that school choice debates are a Federal debate but Federal education spending accounts for less than 8% of total education spending in the United States?