schooling and parental anxiety
Sep. 2nd, 2008 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaAsk Moxie's talking about school today, and the comments are focusing on gifted and talented programs, which in some areas seem to mean "ways we can pull out the mostly white, upper-middle-class kids from the rest of the unwashed masses" and in some areas actually seem to mean gifted and talented kids. There is a G&T program in our city's schools; I don't know what it means here yet.
I posted some of my feelings about how Casper's school this year is going. I'm sort of half-hearted about it; I didn't have a strong positive at the start of the year, and now that we have 3.5 weeks under our belts I am still in the same place. It's the classic middle-class anxiety - I want her to be at school in a special place, one that will challenge and stimulate her, one where she comes home full of new ideas, one that recognizes her for herself and helps make an individualized path to learning. I just want that all in a public school that takes all comers, including the kids whose parents don't speak English, or are only semi-literate, who don't have books in the house, kids who don't get enough to eat at home, who are smacked around or neglected. I think, in theory, that it should be possible, with a low enough student-teacher ratio (in practice, budgets do not allow for this). I think we saw a better approximation of it at our public Montessori magnet last year than we are seeing in our current public school, unfortunately.
Also, no long term reader will be shocked to hear that I an deeply snobby, intellectually. I am tired of being smarter than the people who are teaching my kid (I do grant that they have more training in education than me, and that I would be a disaster as a home-schooler).
We don't have a lot of options for schooling, here. We've already looked at most of the ones that would be at all reasonable for our values and our budget. This seems like the best of the bunch. And it's not bad. But I'm sad that we can't send our kid to a public school that is exceptional, remarkable. I'm sad that EVERY kid can't go to such a school.
I posted some of my feelings about how Casper's school this year is going. I'm sort of half-hearted about it; I didn't have a strong positive at the start of the year, and now that we have 3.5 weeks under our belts I am still in the same place. It's the classic middle-class anxiety - I want her to be at school in a special place, one that will challenge and stimulate her, one where she comes home full of new ideas, one that recognizes her for herself and helps make an individualized path to learning. I just want that all in a public school that takes all comers, including the kids whose parents don't speak English, or are only semi-literate, who don't have books in the house, kids who don't get enough to eat at home, who are smacked around or neglected. I think, in theory, that it should be possible, with a low enough student-teacher ratio (in practice, budgets do not allow for this). I think we saw a better approximation of it at our public Montessori magnet last year than we are seeing in our current public school, unfortunately.
Also, no long term reader will be shocked to hear that I an deeply snobby, intellectually. I am tired of being smarter than the people who are teaching my kid (I do grant that they have more training in education than me, and that I would be a disaster as a home-schooler).
We don't have a lot of options for schooling, here. We've already looked at most of the ones that would be at all reasonable for our values and our budget. This seems like the best of the bunch. And it's not bad. But I'm sad that we can't send our kid to a public school that is exceptional, remarkable. I'm sad that EVERY kid can't go to such a school.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-02 06:31 pm (UTC)She has so much to learn about just getting along with people and being herself in the world that I don't worry too much about how challenging the academic content of her curriculum is right now. She's got other stuff on her plate.
But yeah, a couple months ago I did something I probably shouldn't have done and looked up the actual test scores and demographics for the two tiny "elite" school districts outside of town. One of them was just as white and just as rich I thought and I have no regrets about not moving there. But the other had more racial and economic diversity than I thought, while still performing better than the city schools, and I did feel a twinge of regret that we hadn't compromised our principles enough to move there.