Oni_eyes

Racing gets me if I can fully customize my vehicle and the changes actually have meaning.

Wouldn't that open them up to other crimes like false advertising?

Is this the same dance as shuffling or is that somehow minutely different?

Bunnicula, the scourge of vegetables everywhere

You did say he was more to the right on some issues. And then promptly didn't give any examples. Not super helpful when we could see if his position on those stances had changed since 2008 (considering it's been 16 years since....)

How dare they mess with Sh, It Just Works.

De bang de bang

So you are coming from a place that has:

1. no experience with how this system works
2. Your kids are not actively in the public system and you yourself admit you don't know what it's like in your area
3. You have no understanding of the current teacher shortage by saying that people will just train up to fill new roles (we already have a shortage in stem, with overloaded classes, but sure there will magically be people who want to train to enter this low income career that you're suggesting take on either lower pay for small classes or more pay for even larger classes in another section...)
4. You're advocating for a charter model while talking about the public system despite there being a huge gap between the two in terms of responsibility towards the entire student population in their area (charters don't have to follow all the rules that are tied to federal funds thanks to the Supreme Court, so they can deny the difficult to teach students, not even talking about behavior or grades but disability, which I guess is fine by you as long as it's not your kid getting excluded)
5. Common core is simply the idea that there needs to be a standard set of knowledge taught to everyone as a baseline for well educated citizens. That's not a bad idea conceptually though it does get messed with a lot because there isn't enough funding to actually follow through on it vis a vis teaching staff and support.

I'd be happy to keep going with this but you're missing a lot and I already am overworked with my current students.

What experience do you have to back up any of your ideas? I have a degree, certification, and about a decade of teaching experience and I do not see it working the way you describe.

First off, it seems you're sampling from the Arbitur system (German system of last two years being work related, which only really works because the school system segregates children based on scores for their elementary and middle schools, and which we do not do here and which you did not mention)

Secondly, you say that the school bus system is holding us back and would allow for schools to specialize but we already have that occurring in school districts with normal school bus systems. The bus system clearly isn't preventing magnet schools from existing so that's not the issue.

Thirdly, there are only so many seats at each campus and so how are you going to discriminate as to who gets entry? Will it be based solely on teacher/counselor recommendation, or will there be testing requirements? If you look at private schools which are not in districts and have significantly more funding to specialize, they also do not let the majority of applicants enter. How do we make education accessible without creating these hurdles to allow for specialization that will literally do the opposite for the majority of students (skewing mostly towards lower income/immigrant families who will have issues either with the language or with educational support at home since time has to be allocated towards survival earning instead of spending more time on reinforcement for the student)

Fourth, how do you propose these individual schools get funding to allow for these specializations without tying it to attendance and creating a huge fight over who gets which student (thus going against what might be best for the student)? With district's, at least the money can get moved from one school to the next if there is excess or you need to specialize a school in the district. You can also share physical resources between schools in district's, not so much between individual schools across town.

Fifth, which schools aren't going to have sports fields? Those are typically district property to be used by multiple schools to cut down on costs.

That's just off the top of my head, there's a lot of moving parts and shared resources that look easy to split from the outside while actually being incredibly interconnected.

You're incorrect there. The main limitation for schools k-12 to specialize is funding. To get the equipment and staff necessary takes a lot of money (which is why universities use funding not just from grants that aren't available to public k-12, like from their research sides that do not exist in public k-12). The salary is also a huge problem for specialists since they can easily make more with less stress and more validation on the private sector side.

Even if all that got sorted, you would still want to use districting to consolidate some positions in admin, and to make it easier to plan specializations of k-12 schools (so there's less overlap if it's not needed and you don't have a bunch of waste expenses).

One of the benefits of districts is that you can then afford to have magnet type schools that specialize in one specific field, like performing arts, science, etc. That allows for students who are excelling in that district to get more specialized instruction. As for the transit bit, yes doubling up is troubling but we would need to provide additional routes and runs on each route to improve coverage to the point that school buses become moot. I'm not sure which would be easier to do, though I do want to support the swap to public transit.

The problem for that is logistics. It would be more effective to have those different sized classes taught in the same building rather than different schools so that we wouldn't have to be bussing people all around the district. It would also require both an increase in counselors who can help with identifying learning styles and in teachers who can be matched with the class that suits their teaching style as well.

That would also require an increase in pay for many of these positions since people already don't want to do them because the workload is significant, and that would have to be without increasing the workload because that just keeps the imbalance in place.