Does anyone here oppose alternative schooling?
 

if you do please tell me why.

I am for it but I do think it needs changes in some areas.

Kyle

Bump.

Good topic, but "alternative schooling" is what exactly??

Home schooling?

Public funds (vouchers) for private schools?

So called "charter schools"?

The choice of any school within a system, with the losing schools being closed and reorganized?

Or like far-out "alternative" as in no grades, open classrooms, bilingual-ed or something else??

Studies have shown that 4th-graders in charter schools are significantly behind 4th-graders in public schools.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec04/charter_8-18.html

PS Nice goofy headshots in that article... :D

Oh joy, more bad math from PBS and some teachers union. Most kids in charter schools have had their start in more traditional public schools. Their parents have been givin a choice, and they have taken it. Bully for them!

my son goes to a public charter school. Does that mean he's both ahead and behind?

Dude, RTFA. There's no bad math from PBS here. If it's bad math it's from the Department of Education.

Public schools worked great for me; but not everyone benefits from the same approach. IF (huge if) parents take the time to educate themselves about the alternatives for their children and select the alternative that would be best (or least bad?) for their kids, I'm all for alternative schooling.

If, however, it's a yuppy-fad thing they're doing to have something to brag about, I'm not so for that. You know the 'rents I'm talking about here -- the ones that use their kids as little lifestyle accessories, frequently evidenced by making their kids fashion plates, in the Baby Gap outfits, to the cutesy Abercrombie and Banana crap. The hairdos, the piercings, etc.

Nostatic -- if so, he can have all the opportunities to excel AND b!tch about victim status. That's a dream come true for a lot of people.

JP

hmm...I was wondering why Gloria Allred left a message for Calvin.

"The Department of Education's national assessment of educational progress sampled the reading and math scores of 6,000 fourth graders at 167 charter schools and found only 25 percent of the charter school students were proficient in both reading and math compared to 30 percent of public school students who were proficient in reading and 32 percent in math."

Dude, this is bad math. And poor logic. This teacher's union PR department is mining this report for data to come to predermined conclusions. A valid comparison would be fourth graders in charter schools compared to fourth graders in the failing schools they left behind.

JP is right, (as usual) for these parents, it is often a choice over which school is "least bad", for their kids.