As promised, I will respond directly to people who objected to my earlier posts critiquing the charter school movement.
On June 14, The New York Times ran a front-page article about kindergarten children at the Clara E. Coleman Elementary School from Glen Rock, New Jersey who are learning about the principles of engineering through hands-on activities before they even know how to read. Their task was to design housing that would protect the three little pigs from the big, bad, wolf.
This was a wonderful project, in a wonderful classroom, with an excellent teacher, in an affluent suburban school district. Pictures that accompanied the article showed that the children in this class and school are almost all white. According to real estate estimates and the 2000 census report, in the borough of Glen Rock, about twenty miles from New York City, the medium household income was over $100,000 a year, about 60% of adults are college graduates, houses sell for about $500,000, and the population was 90% White, 6% Asian, 3% Latino, and 2% African American. For the High School graduating classes of 2004 through 2006, over 95% of students indicated that they would move on to a two-year or four-year college.
The New York Times article also highlighted a program in Manassas, Va., which has a thriving biotech industry, where the local school district has spent $300,000 on a children's engineering program since 2008 for projects like "making musical instruments from odds and ends, building bridges with uncooked spaghetti and launching hot-air balloons made from trash bags and cups." There is also a science technology program at the Midway Elementary School of Science and Engineering in Anderson, S.C., where kindergarten children "celebrated Groundhog Day by stringing together a pulley system to lift a paper groundhog off the floor."
In fact, these are all wonderful projects, in wonderful classrooms, with excellent teachers, in affluent white suburban school districts. My point is that public education and teacher preparation in the United States are not failing the American people. What is failing is education in inner-city minority communities and it is failing not because of minority parents, their children, or teachers and their union, but because government on every level, corporations, and white suburban taxpayers, do not want to pay what it will cost to rebuild inner city communities and create decent