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Originally Posted by abaya
I don't know what we will do with our future children. My husband attended private schools in Lebanon because NO ONE, with any means whatsoever, would send their child to a public school there. That's a similar mentality to what I've seen in the UK, Thailand, plenty of other countries. Now in Iceland, there are no private schools. Only public. Imagine what that does to the quality... people actually have no choice other than to send their kids to public school. All the money goes to those schools. I think it's a grand way to go, but that will never happen in the US, sadly.
Personally, I loved the public schools I attended, from kindergarten through graduation. But our district had all kinds of programs for different groups of kids... I got lucky and was placed in a gifted program, and for good or ill, we also had honors classes and the like (which kept me on my toes). The great thing I remember was that my best friend and I wanted to start a whole new course in Advanced Chemistry our senior year, and we did it. It wasn't offered previously, but we found a teacher, decided on a curriculum, and we got enough of our peers to sign up. This was your run-of-the-mill public high school (granted, in a semi-suburban area), but we were able to really push boundaries and explore what we wanted to learn. I know that doesn't happen in a LOT of public schools, for some very complicated reasons, but my experience of public schools was still a good one. I went back to teach 11th grade in the same district and had a similar experience... those kids had it good. They were also 99% white and upper-middle class. And there's your class reproduction...
I agree with pretty much everything roachboy said. And I've seen the same thing with the undergrads I taught at a public university.We are fucking ourselves. People are not "getting dumber," it is not a passive thing, as roachboy pointed out. We are just getting more and more short-sighted and entrenched in our class, as a nation... and I didn't think that was possible!
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Most school districts I know of will adjust the curriculum if the students show demand for a certain class. Where I went to high school, you had to start paperwork with the principal and then sign up 10 students beyond yourself to show interest. A friend of mine tried to do it to get a Latin class at our high school--but evidently only he wanted to learn Latin. Similarly, an interest in having a magnet school program for International Baccalaureate spurred a change in the curriculum at a district level there.
Where my dad is principal, there aren't a lot of honors/AP classes, simply because there aren't enough students. It's unfortunate, but the funding models in most states don't allow for classes smaller than 10 students, and you'll be hard pressed to find a district with a single class smaller than 15 students.
And yes, the funding models vary from state to state significantly. In Oregon our school funding comes mostly from property taxes and state income taxes, and that money is divided up on a per-student basis among the school districts because of the severe limits on property taxes in Oregon. A couple of years ago the schools ran into some severe budget problems after mass lay-offs by employers in the state, which caused the amount of income tax collected to drop. To stabilize this, voters have approved the use of lottery dollars to fund schools--the stupid tax at work.
The funding model here plus the supermajority required to pass a levy/bond makes Oregon's education system stagnant. It's not only K-12 that is affected by this, but higher education as well--the more the state has to contribute to districts' operating budgets, the less there is for the colleges and universities. Because of the need to fund K-12, universities in Oregon have been severely limited in their ability to acquire capital improvement funds from the state--money needed for remodeling our deteriorating buildings. Though they try to change, they don't have the flexibility to truly make lasting changes. However, our legislature more than did their part this last spring, and so I hope the next biennium proves to be better for our schools than the last.
We are finally seeing some capital improvement money around here--three buildings on campus are finally being fixed.
Perhaps if we were all a bit more optimistic, and more dedicated to changing the system, we would do the world some good. And changing the system means a variety of things--as JJ suggested in his post. It's an active thing, so we can't all be pessimists about it--that won't get us anywhere.