Oakland Charter School: Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-charter31-2009may31,0,7064053.story

by cwan • 17 years ago

25 27 17 years ago

cwan3• 17 years ago

On one hand, it's funny how draconian their policies are but on the other, they get results. If education is meant to be the great equalizer then they are providing a strong foundation of knowledge... now as for wisdom... I'm not sure such an environment breeds sufficient amounts of creativity/innovation which is what will be required for countries in the West like the US to compete.

But then again, I'm not sure that this article gives enough detail to make that determination. I do think it's possible to have a structured environment but still allow for flexibility that allows for creativity without er, (for lack of a better word) chaos? It's interesting to think about whether we should manage kids the same way we manage creative people.

gscott• 17 years ago

Plus anyone who can't make it just drops out and attends a regular school. That would help keep the API scores high.

mkinsella• 17 years ago

Just a note: Although this is in the LA Times, the schools mentioned are located in Oakland, not Los Angeles, as the title incorrectly states.

cwan3• 17 years ago

Thanks for that. My mistake.

smanek3• 17 years ago

I like a lot of their ideas. They promote teachers on merit, they don't emphasize political correctness, failing students don't advance to the next grade, and so on.

But, it seems like their teachers don't know how to teach science:

"Zika switches to science. With no lab equipment and an emphasis on textbook learning, it is hard to imagine that American Indian will turn out the next Darwin or Edison. The students have brought in paper towel tubes and, after a discussion of the American space program, Zika leads the class outside, where they have about five minutes for a rare experiment: making rockets. It doesn't go well. With so little time, the experiment more or less fizzles, and then it's lunch."

The most important thing about science is learning how to design and run an experiment to prove something.

And they severely punished a student who stayed home, with his parents' permission, to watch Obama's inauguration. I've got to say that's a kind of short sighted stance. In two decades, what do you think will be more important to the kid - what he learned at school that day or watching the inauguration with his extended family?

cwan3• 17 years ago

I think a counter point (which I don't agree with) might be a question of slippery slopes - and a problem of many rules based systems. They deliberately avoid allowing for exceptions in an attempt at sending a message to everyone / meeting the needs of the aggregate thinking that it's a true trade off in allowing for individualized approaches/exceptions.

I don't know what the environment is like in Oakland - never been, don't have any reason to think I will, but let's say that it's a very difficult environment, while some of their measures may seem extreme, it's sort of like the broken windows/fences approach to teaching. The thinking would be that by clamping down on the small offences, no one even thinks to commit to the big ones. Personally however, I don't think that that should have been considered an infraction or that it should be considered a broken window.

smanek3• 17 years ago

I don't think it's a school's place to decide what constitutes a legitimate reason to miss school - it should be the parent's prerogative. If the parent says it's alright for a kid to miss a day of school - I really don't think the school should be questioning it.

noaharc• 17 years ago

You get what you measure. As PG says, high school is best thought of as a day job.

biotech• 17 years ago

It seems to me, the point of the charter school system is to try new ideas in education. This school seems to have certain ideals:

- teach to the test

- observe all rules, to the letter, no exceptions

I'm sure there are better ways of doing education than this, but, there are also certainly worse ways of doing it. And those worse ways are occuring all over the USA in public schools.

These charter schools take many different philosophies of education. Some do better than others (although it's tough to do worse than many of our public schools...) At its best, there's a type of evolution occuring, where the best ideas survive, and the others are left behind.

krakensden2• 17 years ago

The real question is, as always with small school success stories, can it scale?

It's well enough to hold students to high standards of attendance, performance, etc., but what do you do when you can't just send them off to ``normal'' schools?

Plus, there's a /reason/ most administrators try to be nice to the parents, you don't want them messing with their kids' lives over things that could be avoided.

I do like the fact that they can fire teachers and staff easily, but I have to admit to some trepidation. My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

anamax3• 17 years ago

> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem.

What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that, on average, parents move their kinds to better schools?

If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions, improving the herd so to speak.

When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily.

I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a monopoly.

Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.

krakensden2• 17 years ago

That's nice, except you're ignoring the economics of schooling. It's expensive to pay teachers, to make schools work they need to be nearly at capacity (per-pupil funding, student to teacher ratios, finite amount of space, etc). If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed.

In other words, there is never an incentive to to do better because your competitors can't take your customers.

This could be solved by having lots and lots of mostly empty schools, but... no one is going to pay for that.

It's a lot like the last mile- it's a natural monopoly.

danw• 17 years ago

High test scores and blind following of rules may not lead to people who are happy, creative, entrepreneurial, etc later in life.

jonsen3• 17 years ago

Coerced rule following does not imply blindness.

mjgoins• 17 years ago

These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.

dkarl3• 17 years ago

I think these guys are jerks with a simplistic approach to success, but they're a good foil to current educational orthodoxy. Loopy liberal fuzzy-mindedness really does dominate in the public schools. In fact, as a liberal, I would say that public schoolteachers bear a lot of responsibility for the worst stereotypes of liberals in the US. Teachers have no appreciation for practice and the value of rote learning. If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody.

Best case scenario: the keepers of orthodoxy are so embarrassed at getting whipped by conservative troglodytes that they adopt a few practices from them. More likely scenario: they just stigmatize the effective practices as intrinsically immoral and demand that they be banned.

kragen2• 17 years ago

If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody.

That sounds like the science class discussed in this article, not like the public schools. More generally, it sounds like "teaching to the test".

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

> These kids are essentially the victims of a crime

I would argue that the kids attending (almost) any American public school are the victims of a far greater crime.

kragen2• 17 years ago

Feynman wrote an interesting piece about schools that teach strictly to the test: http://www.feep.org/articles/feynman.html

It seems to me that every student that graduates from this school is going to make the US a worse place to live. How are you going to fix anything that's broken if your colleagues have been trained from early childhood to strict obedience and unquestioning acceptance of authority?

dkarl3• 17 years ago

Acceptance of authority and teaching to the test are two entirely different issues, and these guys are teaching to modern American standardized tests, not the recitation-style tests described in the Feynman excerpt. On the standarized physics tests I took, you typically got a somewhat simplified physical situation and were asked a question about it. You had to decide what physical principles were involved, what kind of reasoning to apply, and how to set up the equations (if math was involved.) Sometimes the problems were quite concrete. Sometimes they were abstract. Sometimes they only required simple application of an equation (but you had to figure out which equation to apply!) and sometimes they required deep reasoning. Very often the situations described resembled laboratory experiments, and solving the problem correctly required recognizing factors that the problem description intentionally failed to call your attention to -- like the inertial component of the ball-rolling exercise described by Feynman.

The school in the article is being compared to other schools on the basis of standardized tests that reflect decades of agonizing over how to design standardized tests so that they can't be gamed through regurgitation. Besides cultural bias (which I think is a real, valid problem, but which doesn't materially affect science tests) the primary criticism you hear of standardized tests these days is that tests are too holistic and can't separate out all the variables that affect a kid's ability to choose the right answer. For instance, a kid might have a wonderful abstract understanding of chemistry but not be able to balance a chemical reaction, read an electron dot diagram, find "Cl" on the periodic table, recognize the word "titration," add two numbers, or figure out which end of the pencil to use on the Scantron. Modern testing techniques have not yet developed to the point where they can tease out that magic variable of "conceptual understanding" from the background noise of "functional incompetence."

Sarcasm aside, and acknowledging that lab skills are much too expensive to test and can safely be neglected by test-obsessed teachers, teaching to modern multiple-choice tests isn't such a bad way to teach science.

pchristensen• 17 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the strong politics are part of the reason for their success. Since the Bay Area is such a Democratic/liberal area, parents who value politics over education won't apply, while those who value education over politics will seek it out. Perhaps you could have similar success with a "liberal school" in Kansas?

Oakland Charter School: Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education

Related Stories