On Sep 28, 2010, at 6:00 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/27/AR2010092701766_2.html?sid=ST2010092701898
>
> [WS:] The following caught my attention
> " Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy, was the last White House student to
> attend a D.C. public school. "
>
> Autres temps, autres moeurs.
Oh, but she only got into *Brown*. If you want to get into Harvard, it's Sidwell Friends.
The WP's education blogger, Valerie Strauss, apparently has more freedom to tell the truth than the higher-profile hacks. She writes:
<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/dc-schools/the-irony-of-obamas-sidwell-re.html>
There is some irony behind President Obama's comment that his daughters could not get as fine an academic experience in a D.C. public school as they do at private Sidwell Friends School: His education policies promote some practices that Sidwell wouldn't dream of adopting.
Obama sparked a heated debate when he said during an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer that schools in the D.C. public system were making progress but were not as good as Sidwell.
My colleague, Jay Mathews, wrote on his Class Struggle blog that Obama was wrong. Jay said that there are some D.C. schools that are “just as good in every important way,” and the important ways he cites are setting high standards and having excellent teachers.
There are indeed teachers in the city schools that are as fine as any teachers at Sidwell, and some D.C. schools set extremely high standards for kids. But high standards and fine teachers do not alone make a great school, not if the fine teachers aren’t given the support and resources they need to help the kids meet the high standards. And, some of these fine teachers have told me, they aren’t.
At Sidwell, a Quaker school, teachers don’t spend days drilling kids to pass standardized tests, and they aren’t evaluated by student test scores. Sidwell has small classes, a wide range of curricular and extracurricular options, tremendous facilities on two big campuses, etc. etc.
The irony is that Obama’s own education policies give standardized testing a central place in public education, though he chose a school for his children that wouldn't see that as a sound way to run an academic program.