I live in Houston, TX, which has one of the worst public school systems extant. I can’t do much, if anything, about HISD - I think it is broken beyond repair. I would like to offer an alternative and open a private, non-religious high school. We would stress excellence in academics, with a goal of all graduating seniors scoring 650+ on the SATs for example. We would also stress leadership and life skills as well. Every teacher would have a degree in the subject taught; no one with a degee in education will be hired, because I want teachers, not “educators”.
I realize that big bucks need to be raised to buy land and build a physical plant, etc. I’ve thought about approaching major corporations for grants and/or ongoing support, as well as applying for government grants. We would need a non-profit corp. set up, etc., so that people could make tax-deductible donations to us. We would have to jump through whatever hoops are required by the state and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to get accreditated properly.
At the moment, all I have is a dream. I’d like to make it a reality. The problem is that I haven’t really got a clue as to how to go about it. Anyone have any experience and/or suggestions as to how I can make it happen?
Isn’t that a bit low of a minimum? A 650 on the SAT is not very difficult at all to get. And what would you do about students who score below the minimum?
I haven’t the faintest idea either. But I would start by getting to know a lot of people involved in private schooling, visiting a lot of schools, and learning all about the laws governing such schools in Texas. Good luck!
While this is a lovely theory, in practice, paricularly with high school students, it is a moronic practice. How many university classes have you taken? While proffesors certainly have a pretty good idea of the topic, for the most part they have never been trained as teachers. In some cases you get some good teachers anyway. In most cases you get marginal teachers, but you paid for the class so you work hard and get something out of it. Now lets put that situation in a high school.
Most Charter schools get the kids whose parents have given up on the regular school. In many of these cases these are people who have never instilled the idea that education is important to their children. They figure it is someone else’s job to do that for them. There is no way in hell that kind of student will do the work needed to overcome a bad teacher. Even a pretty motivated high school student doesn’t often have the maturity to overcome bad teachers.
As a suggestion, I would rethink your thoughts on the lack of value of education degrees. Try taking some of the education classes that should be available localy. Just see what it is. Also look into some of the post baccalaureate programs that are out there. I went into teaching with a bachelors in the area I am teaching in, but I will tell you, without the slightest doubt, that had I not taken some of the education classes I took in my post bacc program my students would have eaten me alive.
Clothahump:I realize that big bucks need to be raised to buy land and build a physical plant, etc. I’ve thought about approaching major corporations for grants and/or ongoing support, as well as applying for government grants.
That, I think, would have to be your first priority; you’d probably need an endowment on the order of millions (depending on how big an enrollment you wanted to have). A colleague of mine and I once informally costed out the idea of starting our own private school, on an extremely modest scale, with rented facilities and minimal amenities, etc., and we found that there was probably no way it could pay for itself with an annual tuition under about $10–15K. And that was without taking into consideration insurance policies, legal advice, etc. Education on a large scale (as opposed to, say, one-on-one private tutoring) is just not an ideal market activity. There’s so much overhead.
Note that cher3’s link discusses charter schools, which are part of (and partly funded by) the public school system, although private sponsors and leaders play a large role in them. Many charter schools are absolutely great, but so far their overall success rate is not that impressive. It’s early days yet, and it’s hard to tell what strategies will be most successful for charter schools. In any case, if you really want to avoid your local public school system altogether, you can’t go charter.
Charter and private schools both tend to have the advantage of “cherry-picking” the best students; they get the students and parents who are most interested in education and most willing to invest in it. This is good for the best students but doesn’t really do much to help the struggling students who are most at risk for a lousy education. Will your proposed school be open-admission, or do you plan to screen students to weed out the unsuccessful and disruptive ones? In the latter case, you’d still be performing a useful service by offering the high-performing students a better education, but you wouldn’t really be solving the problems of the local school system in general.
Having seen what people with education degrees have done to students over the last few decades, I have come to the conclusion that an education degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. Perhaps that is a harsh viewpoint to hold, but it is certainly realistic. After all, HISD is full of people with education degrees and it is an armpit.
Clothahump:After all, HISD is full of people with education degrees and it is an armpit.
Can’t go by that, though: there are also lots of excellent public school systems full of people with education degrees. Considering that all public school teachers have to go through some “approved teacher education program” in order to be licensed, there are going to be lots of teachers with education degrees in all kinds of public school systems.
It was an example. HISD is ecstatic about the fact that their best high school’s graduating seniors score 30 points higher than the rest of the district’s average SAT scores. It sounds real good until you realize that HISD’s SAT average is 500 and their top high school runs about 530.
While 650 may not be difficult to get (and I disagree with that concept, given that the national SAT averages were 514 math/505 verbal in 2000), it is still significantly higher than what HISD thinks is adequate. As far as students scoring below the minimum, I wasn’t planning on making SAT scores a condition of graduation, simply a goal to be achieved.
While I appriciate your disgust at the school system, I would like to sugest that you do not march in to try to fix what you do not understand. There are lots of problems, and frankly teachers are probably not top on the list. If you truely want to make a difference, look at the gammet of problems, don’t just take the easy answer that it is the teacher’s fault.
Absolutly there are problems with some schools of education. I hate the programs that allow professors with a doctorate but no practical experience who try to teach that the only way to get through to students is whatever the hell the latest fad is, but most people get out of school and into a class room and figure some of that out for the crap it is. Those who don’t wouldn’t have been any good to you whatever the degree they walked in with.
I will suggest that as a private school you do have some advantages that a public school doesn’t have. That is some control on parents. You get to remove kids who decide they do not have to come to class on time. You get to remove kids who cheat. I had one kid who plagerised a paper directly from a source I gave them to start their research. The school almost refused to back me when I flunked him. I had to provide documentation that proved I told the students it wasn’t ok to cheat!!
Another problem I saw was lowered expectations. Many schools are afraid of parents suing. Money is so tight, that schools do not want to spend it on even the stupidest case. Any time I flunked a student I needed to document about 12 different things I did to try to get the kid to do what he was supposed to be doing. I do think that parents need to be in the loop, but when the kid doesn’t start showing up to class after the 3rd call, I am pretty sure the 5th isn’t gonna do it. It starts to be easiest to just find ways to pass them. This is absolutely wrong, but human nature.
The biggest problems are kids with the home lives from hell. I had one kid this year we were all pretty sure was homeless. He had a guardian listed as a contact, but that number was disconected and the school social worker couldn’t find them. I watched that kid go from edgy to dangerous over the course of the year. I am not sure he will make his 16th birthday. I had another kid who was living with a grandmother. The grandmother was kind of sick and when she went in the hospital the girl stayed home to take care of younger sibblings. Eventualy she quit coming all together. I saw her last month selling herself on a corner downtown. There was another student who watched his father kill his mother, and another 14 year old who had a baby but the baby died. These were the horror stories. There were the regular run of the mill bad household stories too.
What I guess I am trying to say is that there are so many reasons schools are in trouble. I would suggest that you actually spend time in some of these failing schools. Talk to the teachers, talk to the parents, talk to the students. Find out what the problems are you are really trying to fix. Do not take polititians convenient scapegoats of teachers as gospel. Figure out what is working for students too. It may be that there are substantialy better models, but honestly, this is not a situation that can be made better by ignorance.
Speaking on behalf of my wife, who has not one but three degrees in education…
How do you do a lesson plan for an entire year? How do you teach a student with a learning disability? How do you teach a student with visual or hearing impairments? How do you motivate a student who’s having problems at home or being picked on by classmates? What do you do with a student who was sick or injured and missed a substantial part of the school year? How do you design a test that actually tests what a student should be learning, rather than just regurgitating facts from a textbook? How do you handle a student who craves attention, rather than learning?
These are all things that “educators” learn that have nothing to do with a particular subject.
By the way, how will you measure successful outcomes? Standardized test scores? College admission rates for graduates? If a family is uncooperative/unresponsive/unable to follow your recommendations about working with the student at home, will you continue to try to educate the student against those odds, or tell them to go back to public school?
Now, now. I think we’re all being a little quick to jump on Clothahump’s back with “How do you plan to…?” questions. Hiring teachers without Education degrees might seem odd to some dopers (especially with said degrees), but maybe some further explanation is in order. If he/she had all the answers already, the children of Houston would already be scoring 650’s on their SAT’s.
In all seriousness, good luck, Clothahump. Your dream is certainly an admirable one and I hope you’ll keep us updated on your progress.
** Agent Foxtrot** I think you misunderstand our purpose. I am suggesting that perhaps by dismissing people with education degrees, out of hand, Clothahump is throwing out the baby with the bath water, as it were.
Schools are complex mechanisms. You would not just fire your mechanic and expect to fix your car without at least looking at some book or something about how to fix it. I am suggesting that perhaps she should spend some time in the actual schools she wants to replace. Take some of the classes that teachers have to take. Talk to parents and teachers and administrators and students. See what they think the problems are. She may find that teachers are not the incompetant bad guys she thinks they are. She may find that the problems that she needs to solve are not what she assumes they are. I would just as soon she find out by doing legwork and research than by getting her first group of students wrested from the inner city and trying to hand them off to people who have never had a classroom before, have had no education classes, and have not got the network that most of us build when we are student teachers to find out how to fix a problem. Frankly, those kids have been screwed enough, a do-gooder who hasn’t done her homework can do them more harm than good.
I’m still pretty close to the student side. I graduated from high school in 1999. I’m prepared to admit that, much as I hated her then (she really was a psychopath), one of the teachers I learned the most from in high school was my Junior year English teacher. She’s somewhere around nine hundred and fifty, taught both my sisters and me. BUT she started out as a science teacher. And she was apparently damned good at that too. Because if Presh Gill wanted you to learn something, you learned it. Or ran from the room screaming, your choice. But somewhere along the way, in her thirty year career, she decided she was tired of science, that it was time to move on. My point is, you shouldn’t necessarily judge a teacher by the degree they have or you’ll end up with my AP chemistry teacher who, sweet as she was, and holding a chemistry degree, still couldn’t teach worth shit. She left after a year and apparently went to Vet school.
-Lil
Clothahump, I know of no polite way to say this. You have absolutely no clue what is going on in those public school classes. “Educating” students is infinitely harder than going to college and learning a subject. Being a public-school teacher requires many, many skills – people interaction skills; interaction with young people, their parents (not always lovely), politicians masquerading as administrators, ignoramuses masquerading as “education Governors,” etc. These skills cannot be learned in a “content area” class, so please get it into your mind that this statement
is offensive to every educator who suffers to hear it.
I’m sorry, Clothahump, but the ignorant attitude you’re displaying here does not impress me. Learn the truth about education if you plan on running a school. Don’t just repeat the same tired easy-to-spout-and-sound-clever garbage that these damned politicians keep spewing.
Great idea for a school, by the way. I suggest you hire actual teachers, rather than subject-area “experts.”
I apologize for tearing off a defense of my wife and “educators” in general without trying an snwer to the original post.
If you want to get accredited, you’ll need an academic plan. If you want to get funding, you’ll need a business plan. Both will require measurable outcomes and some description of how you’ll achieve them.
Do you have any idea what this would cost? Say for example getting someone with a computer engineering or computer science degree to teach programming?
It must be a lot different at the college level, because I have absolutely no formal training whatsoever in education, never took an education class, never did a day of student teaching, and honestly have no idea what they could’ve taught that I missed out on.
I could be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that all it takes to teach at a K-12 in Pennsylvania is a masters degree in a subject and one semester of student teaching.
I think they thought you meant 650 total.
Do you think that teachers should be able to pass a comprehensive exam on the subject matter and grade level they teach?
When I took it, you started at 400 points in each section, IIRC.
The same way I do it. And unlike your wife, I have to write the ‘lesson plans’ (which the State Dept. of Ed and our accreditation board calls course outlines) for our approval to grant degrees, yet I have absolutely no formal training in education.
Such as my first grade teacher who attempted to punish me for telling her that it was possible to subtract a larger number from a smaller number, and that the number line extended infinitely in both directions from the zero point.
Supposedly with her ‘education’ degree she should have realized that I was more advanced than the current math book and suggested to the administration that I learn at a more appropriate level?
