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Friday, April 8, 2011

This Week in Education

This week started out with the release of School Chancellor Cathie Black's approval ratings - which hovered around the astonishing rate of 17%. Mayor Bloomberg's response? The approval ratings don't matter or reflect what is important in the schools - that what matters is that people are moving into the NYC school system instead of out of it like they were ten years ago. I don't know what people he's talking about - I meet a lot of people who are actually moving out of NYC because they don't want to send their kids to NYC's public schools. I love living in Brooklyn, but my husband and I agree that our children will not see the inside of the public school building.

And when I heard Bloomberg's response to the approval ratings, I thought, oh crap, that man is firmly entrenched in denial and there is really no hope of him ever getting a clue.

Lo and behold, yesterday, when NPR's regularly scheduled programming was interrupted for the resignation of Cathie Black. My husband sent me a text message: "Black was fired! Happy Birthday!"

I was surprised as anybody that Bloomberg actually got a clue. I still think there were better ways of handling it, but I'm glad he didn't follow in George Bush's example of making a mistake and stubbornly sticking by it. I agree with one commentator (sorry - I didn't catch which one otherwise I'd post the link) who pointed out that Bloomberg missed a valuable opportunity for an educational moment for school kids across the country - that adults make mistakes, and it's best to take responsibility for it and even ask for help in moving forward. Instead of making Dennis Walcott (who also needs an exception and consequently can't start immediately) School Chancellor, Walcott should be the interium, while Bloomberg asked for everyone's help in conducting a nation wide search for the right candidate for the largest school district in the nation, and that local home grown Walcott stood a good chance for the job.

Walcott is profoundly more qualified than Black. Though, let's be honest, it wouldn't take much to have more qualifications than - nothing. I do hope he's able to make a difference for public school kids, teachers, and parents.

However, we're still not sending our kids to public school. For a variety of reasons. That would take up a whole other series of blog posts.

Where we would send our kids to public school, however, is in Finland. I have long idealized the Scandinavian notions of education (it's mostly Steiner/Waldorf & Montessori oriented), but this article in Time again makes me wish for dual citizenship with Finland. I don't know that what has Finland succeed in education would work in the states. While in theory we have rather democratic notions and would like to think of ourselves as ingrained in the ideas of equality, spend a little time on the playground - or applying to pre-school or pre-K programs in New York where you have to prove why your child would make more of worthwhile contribution to the potential pre-school class over someone else's kid - and it doesn't take long to realize that we are almost as obsessed about our kids getting ahead of their classmates as the Chinese.

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