Back to School Night: Part II
by teachbad
In Back to School Night: Part I, I sketched out differences between two schools.
School #1 is a public charter school, has pretty poor facilities, test scores are high, parent engagement is high, and the teachers appear to have a relatively high degree of freedom in the classroom and seem to be happy.
School #2 is a regular public school, has amazing facilities, test scores are low, parent engagement is low, and the teachers are strictly regimented and mostly unhappy.
What I left out, intentionally, is that School #1 has a student population that skews heavy to the middle– and upper middle-incomes while School #2 skews just as heavy to low-income students.
At the end of the post I posed the following provocative question: What’s going on here?
I want to talk about the requirements placed on teachers in these two schools. At School #1, my son’s school, it appears to me that teachers have a great deal of freedom in deciding how they want to begin their classes, pace them, schedule assessments, choose texts, create projects and other assessments, etc. They are trusted to do these
