I’ll be one of the guest bartenders at a fundraising event this Thursday, June 26th, at Ulysses Gastropub in north Wilmington, located on the southwest corner of the intersection of Marsh and Silverside. All of the tips and 15% of meal tabs go to benefit First State Montessori Academy, a new charter school opening up in downtown Wilmington this August.
Ullysses will be releasing two new micro-brews from Yards and Mispillion River. Also, we will be auctioning off Kids First Swim lessons, a value of $95.
The event runs from 6 to 9 pm; I’ll be behind the bar from 7-7:30 pm, but will be at Ulysses for the whole three hours. I hope to see some of you there!
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Also, ICYMI, my Insider post on the Josh Byrnes firing went up last night.
Why the support of a charter school? Charters seem to get a lot of support publicly even though they self-select their populations (even lotteries are selective because you have to enter the lottery), use more money, and get lesser results than public schools. And, they’re often union-busting. I don’t understand why so many otherwise progressive people support them. They’re the opposite of everything progressivism is supposed to be about.
That’s a wonderfully broad generalization. In this case, it’s simply about providing a better education for our daughter than the public school can offer.
Yes, it is broad, it’s also broadly true. There are, I’m sure, some charters who do good things, but even the one you send your kids to is selective and takes public money without truly being open to the public. Obviously, I can’t see their books, but I’d guess they get more money per pupil than the average public school in your area. That’s very, very often how it goes.
I totally understand being unwilling to send your kid to typical public schools. I’m not sending my kids to regular public schools and I teach in them (we’re going to homeschool), but that has much more to do with the way public schools have their hands tied with standardized testing and types of accountability to which charter schools are, generally speaking, not held (which is why that charter can give your daughter a better education, that and the advantaged population that charters tend to draw).
But, as long as charter schools operate with public money and use any kind of selection process, they are taking resources away from less advantaged kids.
I wondered if it was your kid’s school, but you didn’t say so in the post, and I figured you would have it was.
All my points stand, though. Charters often seem like a good choice for an individual kid, but they haven’t proven good for society. There is a mountain of data supporting that claim, as I’m sure you’re aware.
None of this has any relevance to my decision to send my daughter here or support the school.
As an intelligent individual and an obviously thoughtful parent, you must have good reason for selecting this charter school for your daughter. All schools deserve to be judged on their merits, because one bad school, public, charter or private, certainly does not represent all others (duh).
As someone who has been involved with multiple charters, my warning is to pay very close attention to their leadership. A quick search of “charter school embezzlement” will illustrate my meaning. In my experience I have yet to see a charter school that did not operate as at least one person’s get rich quick scheme. That covers five separate schools. The model seems to attract them.
Best of luck to you and your family Keith.
@Todd: I’ll even link to an article on a recent study on that very topic. I believe the sector is rife with fraud and mismanagement. Of course, the public education system is rife with the same, as a google search for “public school embezzlement” is just as disheartening.
No doubt. But I won’t ever forget the words of a local charter school CEO shortly after he was caught shredding papers that implicated him in between two and three hundred thousand dollars worth of kick-backs. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something akin to: “The charter school gave me autonomy that I never would’ve had at a (district) school.” Like I said, it all depends on the individual school and more importantly, the individuals running the school. If the charter builds checks and balances into its business plan I’d feel far more comfortable with it than the five I had a front row seat to see grow and eventually burn.
Again, good luck and I hope the fundraiser is a fun and rousing success.
Forget public vs. charter… why Montessori? Eash…
@Kazzy: Maybe because Montessori schools foster creativity? Or because they improve cognitive and social performance? The research on Montessori is solid – and that’s before the Common Core showed up in the public schools.
Progressives are on the wrong side of history re: education. They, along with unions oppose nearly all forms of innovation and change in education. Minority parents especially favor being able to send their kids to schools they choose, not be forced to send to the schools the don’t approve. They reject the zip code lottery.
Unions in education have done a great job enriching members, a poor job educating all of our citizens. Spending has exploded, like healthcare, yet we have nothing to show for it. We tried it the progressive/union way, time for change. You might as well get on the right side of history Mr JL.
I’m surprised people are questioning and judging Keith’s individual (along with his wife) choice of school for their child. The right side of this debate is to support individuals being able to make their own decisions where their kids attend school. The money a family pays toward education should be transferable to any school they choose.
Great to meet you tonight, Keith! Hope the fundraiser ended up going well – looked like a pretty full house. Hope also that your experience with FSMA will be a good one; for down the road, I’ll note there are some very good independent schools in the area as well. I’d personally recommend at least looking at an all-girls school; I’ve taught at one outside Philadelphia the past seven years, and I think it can be a hugely valuable and empowering experience for girls/young women to have. I know it has affected my own outlook significantly.
@Preston: Thanks, great to meet you too. I wish the fundraiser had been more organized – I ended up doing virtually nothing behind the bar – but at least I got to meet a few readers while I was there.
@keith
That first link doesn’t say what you think it says. And the second one doesn’t indicate any controls. I’ve worked with children for over a decade and seen firsthand the results of the Montessori approach. There are no doubt benefits to it and I incorporate certain aspects of it into my classroom. But most applications of the approach struggle most with fostering creativity and teaching social skills. Any philosophy that celebrates children spending 60+% of their time engaged in independent play and exploration with materials that are rigidly limited in their use is going to see that result.
Also, how much have you actually read about the Common Core? Much of the criticism out there is the result of politicized fear mongering.
She’s your daughter and at the end of the day you and your wife need to feel confident about the school you send her to. But as an early childhood educator, I’d implore you to look more closely at what Montessori does and does not do and how those kids transition into other settings when they eventually leave the Montessori environment. When I get four- and five-year-olds transitioning to my program, the two things they struggle most with are engaging with their peers and taking part in open-ended activities.
@Kazzy: I haven’t read anything on Common Core. We just lived through it and saw how disastrous it was, from the complete lack of science or social studies material for 2nd graders to the convoluted methods of teaching basic arithmetic. My daughter, who enjoyed her two years in school in Arizona and learned quite a bit, complained that she was bored and that she was repeating material in her one year here under Common Core. I’d call it a joke, but reducing numeracy levels isn’t funny. Our hope is to stay out of the public school system at least until Common Core is dead.
@the people
As a teacher in an independent school, I fully support parents’ ability to select a school of their choice. That does not mean I cannot criticize particular models that I find worthy of criticism.
Keith, your experience with Common Core was far more likely a problem with the school’s (and probably district’s) implementation than with Common Core standards themselves. There is nothing in Common Core about HOW to teach anything. It’s simply a set of standards – information, concepts and skills – to teach. In that regard it is no different than the previous state standards, except that it seeks to trim the excess crap that got in the way of meaningful teaching in the name of “getting through the textbook.”
Districts who saw it coming and planned for it have done well with iCommon Core’s streamlined structure. For example, as an English teacher I used to have to cover all kinds of minutiae that were not connected by any instructional foundation. The Common Core took away the meaningless details and allowed me to focus on teaching for understanding rather than rote memorization or teaching from a checklist. But that’s consistent with Common Core’s guiding principle and something my district fully supported, so the professional development around the new standards was beneficial to me, my department, my school and, most importantly, our students.
If you want more details I’d be glad to engage in that conversation privately to give you an idea of what exactly my district did to use Common Core to its advantage.