The paradox of "choice" in the voucher debate

I find it interesting that Utah legislators would go to such lengths to pass a controversial and generally unwelcome bill about "choice," and then ignore voters' opinions. Isn't it a central tenet of school choice philosophy that people are the best equipped to make choices for their own families, not agents of the state? So why this bill, fellas? Polls should have made it clear to you where Utahns stand. If not polls, the referendum (first successful one in 33 years) should have been the a-ha moment.

It's unwise to not to give the public a choice about "choice."

Hey, where's my puff piece?

I went to the New York Times' Education page and watched an online slide show by Winnie Hu about a "nationally recognized model of a middle school that gets things right." I watched, impatient to learn where these teachers went right (and where I apparently go wrong). And then the expletives began.

Not that I don't applaud this wonderful school and its nurturing, dedicated teachers and clearly great kids. But is it really that exceptional? In my own classroom, I have students debate as Roman senators dressed in togas and I have students write fractured fairy tales (by the way a common assignment). I also have them create websites, work in multiple writing genres, and debate whether or not the US should have dropped the atomic bomb. In short, I'm the average teacher.

This could have been my school in that video. To me, this video which takes practices I see as a rule as labels them as an exception does a disservice to education. It skews perception and nudges the reader to expect very little from the typical school (what's on the walls in an "ordinary" school I wonder, non-motivational posters?).

The article quotes Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, an Illinois-based group, as saying “We’d like high-performing middle grades schools to be the norm in our country, but right now they are more the exception.” I visited the National Forum site, looking for information supporting this claim and found none. Are we so used to hearing this we no longer require proof?

I especially liked the Schools to Watch program selection criteria. I would like to share them with my faculty (and I'm pretty sure we could make their list- after all, they only had 40 schools apply). These are the same standards and criteria I hear at teacher trainings, faculty meetings, at the faculty lunch table, etc. They are nothing new to any middle school teacher.

So to Winnie Hu, the New York Times, and Deborah Kasak I would say- you are exactly right about what needs to be happening in middle schools. And celebrate the fact this it IS happening, maybe more than you give credit for.

Vouchers for Utah?

Utah may soon become the Holy Land for not just Mormons, but Libertarians as well. The first universal voucher program in the country hangs on a November vote. House Bill 148, Education Vouchers, barely passed the State legislature (it fared better in the Senate than the House). The Utah Education Association, the PTA, the School Boards Association, NAACP and others soon joined forces and filed a referendum petition to stop the program from going into effect. 124,000 signatures later and vouchers are on the Nov. ballot. Utahns for Public Schools and Parents for Choice in Education now have a few months to battle for voters. More on that from me later- get a pretty good summary now from Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

I listened to the floor debates, dropped my jaw from time to time (Utah schools are failing? Really? Since when?), then happily gathered petition signatures to remedy what I saw as a complete and unfair disregard for public input.

As a teacher, the last thing I want to be is uneducated. My goal: to understand the theoretical and practical arguments for and against vouchers- specifically in Utah. Summer fun.