The inherent problem with public education is that it is, well, public. You have a system that is doomed to fail someone. Think about it. When something is designed to "reach the masses," it effectively means that it is one-size-fits-all. As we all know, this doesn't work with T-shirts, much less education.

When people talk about bridging the proverbial gap, it's always the same conversation. The government empowerment types always shout for more money, more laws, more testing. The free-market guys call for school choice and teachers competing for pay. I'm only asking this. Why have we only gone at this from one side?

I know a number of people that went the charter school route, and it was the best decision that they ever made. Why? Because they, like most of us, are looking to meet the individual needs of their kids, which is something public schools fail miserably at, though not for lack of trying.

The problem is that we have worked ourselves into this idea that a school for the "masses" must also be individualized, whereby it is forced to integrate learning-disabled students into regular classrooms. It might make them feel good, but it's not necessarily giving them a better education. Teachers, without aides present, must pace the class differently just so those kids don't get completely lost. Yet, the quicker students will bog down and stagnate in their education. Doing it right costs money, because you need the aide in there working with the one or two kids that will be way behind. Hence the need for more funding, starting the calls to the state and federal government which inevitably result in too little funding, meaning the school has to cut something else (like band and orchestra, for example), leaving a hole somewhere for someone. The phrase "You can't please everyone" certainly comes into play here.

If public schools are going to succeed, they must do one of the following things. 1) Admit that you can't give everything to everyone. At least that's honest. Legislators, you guys should wake up on this as well, because no law you write will ever change this. 2) Act more like a charter school. Feel free to track, departmentalize, group, sort, rank and file. Let the "smart" kids go the academic route. Let the hands-on guys go to vo-tech. Let the artistic kids concentrate on music and art. Stop trying to put everyone into one gigantic group and run around like a Wall Street trader trying to snag every individual kid. 3) Stop voting for the same people over and over again. The politicians you elect to "save our schools" inevitably write legislation that does something to hurt them. This last one is for government. PLEASE stop trying to test everything with standardized tests. Some things just don't lend themselves to bubble sheets. I'm waiting for the day that taking a leak and flushing is on the test (although some of our brighter students do seem to have trouble with that one).

"Public" education, as we know it, isn't going away. Ever. But we can learn something from the few flashes of the free-market that make their way into they system. Add a little free choice into the mix and good things can happen. After all, we are all "pro-choice," right?

So why do you suppose people favor 'one size fits all'? Back when I was a kid people were sort of proud of the fact that all the students were put together, regardless of ability. That was sort of regarded as part of the learning experience. 'One size fits all' was held as a civilizing force that encouraged outsiders to assimilate and helped build our uniquely American egalitarian identity.

I remember my grandma was so excited about integration. She was convinced that all the black kids would soon learn to walk and talk like white kids. After all, who wouldn't want to be like us? Dreams die hard, and there are still a lot of people for whom anything other than 'one size fits all' amounts to giving up on integration. Assigning schools based on testing, which repeatedly has led to lower scores for minorities, is regarded as racist. Allowing free choice will inevitably lead to segregation, too, because it's pretty clear that most black kids and white kids don't really care about being integrated. They may not like racism and bigotry, but that doesn't mean that they really want to be integrated.

OK, dude, in your effort to make me out to be a segregationist while writing about the down-home good old days of yore when we all got along and life was beautiful, you completely missed my point. So, I will simplify this for you.

The people that send their kids to public school are asking for individualized instruction and individual accommodations. That would be the consumers of public education. However, public education is not set up to be that way. I'm waiting for the day when every single kid in a given school has an IEP. Public school is one-size-fits-all, and that's not what people are looking for. Think of a high school that graduates 200 kids per class. You have 800 kids in grades 9-12. Education for the masses might adequately reach 600, but what about the other 200? The hundred or so that are either learning disabled or just simply have low aptitude, or the other hundred or so that are very high on the spectrum are the ones that aren't being served adequately, especially the high end. This is exactly why charter schools are necessary, so that kids in, say, the City of Pittsburgh can go find something, ANYTHING that's better than what they are getting while receiving training for college and their careers to boot.

Second, free choice has absolutely nothing to do with segregation, racism or bigotry. Period. Moreover, one's goal for attending school should have nothing to do with "diversity" and everything to do with getting a good education. If I'm an "A" student that wants to go to college to major in music, why shouldn't my parents have the choice to send me to a school that will help me receive that specific training while still getting all the "basics"? Because you're worried that not enough black kids will go with me? Sorry, pal. Not good enough. Diversity by itself is of no value. Diversity as a result of freedom, on the other hand, is of great value.

It's funny how the biggest defenders of public education won't look at its inherent problems and try to fix them. I'll give you another example. How about all this "self-esteem" education nonsense? We're so obsessed with making sure everyone feels good about themselves that we aren't educating them. Remember the big push to eliminate grades a few years ago? Yeah, let's not evaluate the kids. Now, I'm not an advocate of this mad dash to standardized-test everything under the sun, but how about some accountability? How about actually teaching kids how to spell like they did back in the good old days of the 1980s? How about actually holding a kid back a grade if they failed miserably? This "push 'em through so our graduation rate looks better" philosophy hasn't gotten us anywhere.

In short, the entire educational system has lost focus on what it should be doing. If you want one-size-fits-all, then lets provide a school that offers what everyone needs. Reading, writing, math, science, history, music and art, physical education. Aristotle would be proud.

Actually, public schools will inevitably be conducted as a business. Low overhead, and high profits are all that matter. When our government backs off and permits school systems to run themselves in a regionally competitive environment, this will all change. What I expect for my children is that they will be educated to MY standards. Whether their education is public or private, that is what I expect. And to be fair, that's what is happening about 80% of the time. If I were unhappy with that, I could home school them. It's all up to ME, not the system. In fact, even now I view administrators and teachers as MY assistants in educating my children. That helps keep things in perspective...

FBH, unfortunately many parents don't buy into that perspective. I believe that teachers are expert educators (for the most part), but there has to be that link to home. It is a rapidly growing problem that parents do not see themselves as educators, when in reality, they are the primary educators. I'm not kidding when I say that there are parents who send their kids to school not knowing their alphabet, basic numbers, or even their parents' first names or their own phone number. Worse, these parents think it's the teachers' job to teach their kids these things. Forget school, if your kid gets lost at the mall you want them to know mommy's first name, for crying out loud. Simply put, these are the parents that are demanding more and more out of "public" education.

I'm actually in agreement with you, hence why I am OK with charter schools. As a parent, it's not only your right, but your duty to make good decisions about your child's education. That may include charter schools, it may not. Either way, there's a level of involvement that you talk about that is minimal if not nonexistent with many parents.

You write convincingly about the benefits of choice and the virtues of parental responsibility. But you owe it to yourself to figure out why even very simple change is so difficult. It is obvious we'd all benefit from schools that focus on the best and worst students. But unfortunately if you 'profile' the parents of the best and worst students you get a political trainwreck.

People will complain that schools/programs for the best students are elitist... They will complain that schools/programs for the weakest students are for 'warehousing' the poor. But where these arguments really start to take on some bite is when they are made in racial terms. (I'm sorry if you felt that accusatory bite in my earlier comment--it wasn't meant to be directed at you...) If someone starts to complain that programs for good students benefit whites, asians and Jews, or that programs for poor students are for resegregating minorities, then you've got real problems. And, inevitably, someone will say it, and the numbers will probably back them up. What then? As near as I can tell this is where every intelligent conversation about schools comes to a screeching halt.

Which is why I'm pretty well convinced that race is the dominant factor in public education, and it has been since desegregation in the sixties/seventies. If there is one conversation no one wants to get involved with it is a conversation about race, but since schools have been the centerpiece of efforts to desegregate our society it is a difficult topic to avoid.

It does seem to come back to race. At our school district (austinisd.org) we have an African American drop out prevent coordinator who was not local - that is, she was hired from out of town/state who suggested that some of the at-risk, drop-outs, etc. might be better suited to vocational (brick layer, auto mech, etc.). She told our group (biz/gov't, non-profits) that she was 'almost attacked and called a bigot' Statiscally, most of these kids are minority, older, 18 + and are living with either an older sibling or grandparent. It is an issue that the group I'm involved with are working to solve.

I do agree that it is about parental involvement. My oldest (10 yo male) is doing well. The younger (7 yo male) is doing well academically but socially he is behind. I was very up front with both teachers about behavior - that if they are having any trouble with classroom behavior that we (yes, thankfully there is a mom and day) would support them in discipline and consequences. Within the first, she was contacting us and communicating his bad and good days. Encouraging and building up his positive actions, correcting and punishing his negative behaviors. I think my wife put it best when she said, "it's called being a parent."

forgot to add this... for the record...

I am a hispanic male with a college degree and my wife (non-hispanic) is a teacher with a Masters in Ed. Administration.

I am from a large family (6 kids) with 5 of the 6 who have degrees and one (older sister) who has a Ph.D in Education.

So, my family is way out of the statisical norm

Herein lies a societal problem that manifests itself in our schools. This is, in a nut shell, a race-bating society. Many folks look for anything they can find that appears to be racist and ride that horse till it keels over. If, as you say, a school or program for low-performing students has more blacks than whites, some idiot will say that it's a segregationist dumping ground for blacks. No, it's a class for low-performing kids, it just so happens that more of them are black. Here we are trying to provide a solution that we can't use. And we wonder why our schools are failing? I think this proves my earlier point.

I think it's clear that someone that is in any kind of position of authority in a school or district start making the case that we need to simply stop talking about race because it's distracting us from the real purpose of school. At some point, be it school programs, employers, colleges, banks, insurance companies, or whatever, need to place, accept, or deny people based on merit and actual accomplishment. A huge reason we are in the mortgage situation we're in is because bankers' policies of minimum loans, application fees, and yes, loan denials, were called "racist" (this was back in 1992) because poor people from the inner city (primarily black) couldn't get loans. Forget that they couldn't afford them, we had to make sure they got 'em. Presto-chango, you have a mortgage crisis.

My only other comment from a socio-economic perspective is this. Did we first discover poverty last week? Doubtful. Let me ask you all a vital question to this discussion. How many of us had rich, well-off parents? Now, how many of us had rich, well-off grandparents? Great-grandparents? I'm sure the number gets smaller with each generation as we go back. Didn't our grandparents and great-grandparents figure out a way to learn what they needed to learn and eventually make a living for themselves? My grandmother was born in 1922. She had plenty of memories of the real Great Depression. When a bowl of cereal was your big meal for the week, or when actually putting moo-cow milk on it instead of water was a luxury, one has to ask just how important socio-economic status really is. My grandparents generation struggled, toiled and suffered. Not a handful of them, most of them. Yet, in the end, they wound up with their own free-standing house, a car or two, and maybe even a color TV. They got through it, and no, they weren't stupid.

This is why I'm so adamant about parents actually giving a damn about their kids and being involved in their education. It isn't just about money. If you have enough to eat, keep a roof over your head and clothes on your body, that should be more than enough to get through learning your multiplication tables. Hard work and accountability cannot be replaced by government policy or school initiatives. It may sound harsh, but it is true.

Right on - agreed on all counts.

I would only add that schools will need to be able to weed out the seriously disruptive kids if even the middle tier of students is to have a chance. 1 crazed kid per class can take 30% or more of a teacher's attention, and it is very hard to get these hard cases out of a school.

We don't have to dump these kids into the street, set them on a course for prison. Just build places for them, classrooms, schools, shop programs. As you say, it will cost money. More difficult - it will take will.

There is a mistaken view that a person must be TAUGHT something in order to learn. The really smart kids will go out and learn on their own. The purpose of school is to teach the basic skills in order to function in a society, and that includes interaction with people who are different from you.

Ronin, you're right, but that's not my point. Even the smart kids need to be shown the correct path now and then. If we're going to send kids to school, shouldn't they get something out of it? As far as the interaction with different people line, did I say something to the contrary? Please explain.

Corn, yes, that is 100% true that even one disruptive kid can be a huge impediment to the daily functions of a classroom. Of course, if you do what you suggest, you're labelled a racist, or a segregationist or you are in some way making a kid feel bad about his issues (that need to be solved). You just can't win with some people.

Mr. J, you are out of the statistical norm because you and your family actually gave a crap and opted not to buy into the group victimhood that so many of our fellow citizens do. That's what it comes down to. Simply deciding that, whether you start out rich or poor, you can and will be successful if you do the right things. I'm not saying it will always be easy, but it can be done.

hi FordTruck5Speed,

(Haven't we met somewhere else on Slate before?)

Your toppost seems to suggest that the current situation is one-size-fits all OR charter schools. Here in the Baltimore area, nothing could be further from the truth.

Both the city school system and the country school system offer their high school students lots of choice. If kids don't like their neighborhood HS, they can choose to go to a HS that is more academically rigorous OR focused on the performing arts OR vo-tech OR focused on health careers OR business oriented OR a math & science school OR... I don't even remember all the choices.

In addition, both the city and the county offer some charter schools, which have personal control of the $ they get.

In addition, both the city and the county offer "alternative" schools for the rowdy potential dropouts.

In the city, the Gates Foundation has provided $ for the large schools to separate into 2 or 3 smaller academies within the building.

The challenge is to teach those kids whose only "choice' is to stay at their neighborhood school.

And yes, the county provides bus transportation to whichever school a kid wants to go to. City kids use city buses to get to whichever school they want to go to.

It's far from perfect, but it's much more than the either-or choice you posit in your toppost.

Mary Ann

I understand your point, MaryAnn. There is kind of a watered-down version of that here in Pittsburgh, too. Granted, Pittsburgh Public Schools are by no means ideal (although better than Cleveland). However in Pittsburgh's case, the city and school system are both shrinking and thus limiting the choices available.

Pittsburgh City schools aside, most school districts, at least in my experience, do not have that array of choice that you describe in Baltimore (I also don't know much about student performance in Baltimore). Virtually every district that I know of has it's standard array of elementary schools, one or two middle/jr. high schools, and one big high school, maybe two if the district happens to be large enough (there are a few of those in central PA and near Philly). While I'm not disputing your ideas, I don't think that the situation you describe is the "norm" for most places. In my district, for example, if you want to concentrate in something besides the run-of-the-mill, you have to opt out of your "regular" school and go to a charter school or other private institution (although we do offer vo-tech here).

By the way, yes I think we have kicked around some ideas before, but I'm out of luck remembering just where. Either way, it's good talking to you again.