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Old October 28th 03, 05:47 PM
Ericka Kammerer
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

Jenrose wrote:



Um, she *is* in a public school.



Then I would prepare to see the school's flexibility
whittled away, little by little. (Sorry to be cynical, but
I'm afraid I'm not all that optimistic on this front.) I
think our public school system is quite good and I am happy
with the education my children are getting there, but I
keep seeing more and more flexibility taken away by both
state and national initiatives.


snip
This leaves kindergarteners with eight hours of homework and caffeine
jitters at the age of five, carried to the logical conclusion. I don't want
to even think about preschool.

I hyperbolize, but you get the point.



Absolutely. This is a very common attitude and getting
more and more common.


It was very important for us to find a program that let kids be kids without
the heavy homework load. She has gone from no homework in kindergarten to
not quite an hour in 5th grade on a "heavy" night, and never not been able
to get her homework done working no more than 10 min x grade level every
night. Thus, with reasonable, age-appropriate expectations (and how many
emotionally average academically gifted kids get loaded with age
inappropriate amounts of work when their "enrichments" pile on top of a
normal workload....) she's actually developed study skills which seem rare
in kids that bright.



I agree with you 100 percent. I just think that public
schools like this are going to get more and more rare in the
current legislative environment.


But the point is that *all* these programs operate with the same budgets the
neighborhood schools get, per pupil.



This is a red herring in most cases. The big player
in funding for public schools is often how many "special"
cases the school has to deal with (e.g., language barriers,
severe learning disabilities, etc.). Schools that don't
have to deal with these issues effectively have much more
money to spend on the population at large.


There are some who argue that this kind of program "saps" the neighborhood
schools of the brightest kids. In my experience, neighborhood schools with a
"standard" normal curriculum rarely make enough use of the brightest kids to
justify keeping them.



Except that the brightest kids drive up the test scores,
and with test scores becoming so all-fired important, lowered
test scores have very real impacts on all the students in a
school. There's also a secondary effect--the brightest kids
generally bring more affluent and more involved *parents* to
the table, which translates into more money for the school
(through the PTA) and all sorts of other advantages.

What delights me about
this program in particular is that it manages to provide an enriched
learning environment for the same money to ALL kids at all ability levels.
Isn't that how it *should* work? Shouldn't people be looking at taking this
model out to the neighborhood schools?



Absolutely. Programs that are working well should
be looked at and their ideas co-opted wherever possible.
However, I would be cautious about the money issue. If
your school is really serving the full gamut of abilities
on the same dollar, that's wonderful. Odds are, however,
that it's not, nor is it likely coping with as high a
percentage of the more difficult to educate children
(extreme poverty, etc.). That's not to say that other
schools shouldn't be taking a page from your school's book.
From many of the things you've said, it sounds like there
are a bunch of very valuable things that likely *would*
help with no downside whatsoever. I'm just suggesting that
sometimes the problem is a little more complicated than
it first appears--and all these relatively recent
legislative attempts towards accountability through
testing and other "objective" standards are complicating
the situation significantly. (I'm not against
accountability per se, but I have a lot of heartburn
with the way it's often implemented.)

Best wishes,
Ericka