I don’t see why an education market wouldn’t exhibit, albeit in it’s own special way, the tumultuous characteristics of the food service industry.

You’ll have the burger drive-thru schools that cater to the lower-end or convenience-driven market that just wants a square, educational meal and – since I’m from the Detroit area – the Rattlesnake Club schools that cater to the wealthy end of the spectrum in which the entertainment experience is practically secondary to the educational content. Educational lunch wagons and scholastic vegan family-styles. Schools will come and schools will go and it’ll be up to parents, in aggregate, to decide what’s important and how it ought to be packaged.

To the folks dependent on the current system or incapable of contemplating anything else it’s a vision of hell but that’s how monopolists view the free market and they will do what they can to avoid that hell of demands that are ignored at peril and competitors who, relentlessly and unhelpfully, set the bar continuously higher.

By the way, if you want a reality check on the ability of poor parents to determine what’s educationally best for their children I recommend you Google some articles by Dr. James Tooley. If parents for whom a tuition of $2 per month – yes, per month – is a serious sacrifice can make informed judgments about the quality of the education their child gets from a given school I think American parents, even impoverished American parents, can manage the same trick.

As long as the providers are convinced that burgers are good enough for this crowd–except for the few that make the trek to Mom’s, nothing will change. And this is where schools–as public institutions–have an obligation to differ from the marketplace. I believe that parents, as a group, and including low-income parents, have far more to contribute to education than Robert is willing to give credit for. Sure, it’s easy to buy off the parent of a reasonably successful kid by showing how it is working for their child. But what about the kids (the majority in some schools) who are not making it? Sorry–but they are not buying into the limitations that schools have accepted–their kid will never amount to much because s/he is poor, minority and probably stupid to boot. That is why parents are marginalized–not because they don’t know what is going on, but because they do.

Robert, you wrote “the mischief comes when we literally expect every single child to achieve at a high level…” which I think is a pretty odd idea in view of the generally rather dismal level of achievement that’s come to be seen as the norm.

If too-high expectations are the problem why hasn’t it been generally noticed that they’re nowhere near being met?

If you expect all the players on your baseball team to be .400 hitters I think it would be odd to continue to expect that level of performance with decade after decade of disappointment. A certain amount of wishful thinking is understandable if not evidence of a very realistic attitude but when wishful thinking goes on, seemingly without end, it’s time to entertain other possible motivations besides unrealistic hopefulness.

But the assertion that expectations are too high overlooks those relatively uncommon situations in which the expectations are met. Like I wrote, Joanne’s book details one such, there are others and they spring into existence and are extinguished or spring into existence and continue for varying periods defying your explanation of the too-high expectations resulting in too-poor results.

If you believe that too-high expectations results in poor kids performing poorly then it’s incumbent upon you to also find a means of explaining the exceptions. Otherwise you ought to revisit your hypothesis to see where it needs to be modified to deal with situations in which poor kids meet, even exceed, expectations which are very high and achieve at levels to satisfy the most demanding parents.

Margo/Mom, I’ve come to be convinced that the marginalization of parents in the public education system is the source of all that ails public education. That marginalization is nowhere more effective then in big, municipal public school districts and on no one more effective then poor parents.

That means that parental choice is a panacea because at a stroke that parental marginalization is reversed.

Concerns about the competence of parents to make decisions about the education of their children have to be measured against the accountability and skills of the professionals. I would say that the state of public education in the U.S. strongly inclines towards the position that parental concern trumps professional skills.

NCLB focuses on two key roles of parents. One, which you mention, is the parent as consumer role–trusting to the schools “market” to respond if parents have more than a single choice regarding where to send their children to school. This has received the bulk of the attention. However, the other specified parent role in NCLB is that of decision-maker, of engaged stakeholder in the reform process. NCLB is very specific in requirements that parents be included in the school improvement planning process. Few in fact are. School responses to this requirement range from blatant disregard, to cursory public meetings to small committees of hand-selected parent participants.

And yet–in the end–this is the only accountability system that is likely to have a long-term effect. It is relatively easy to snow accountability bureaucrats. If the school commits to solving the low math score problem by providing professional development, they can provide some receipts and certificates and be done with it. Parents are far more likely to be on top of asking critical questions about–how did that work out? Did the training change anything that is happening in the classroom? Why am I seeing the same old worksheets for my second child that weren’t working for my first?

Parents, it has been shown, are concerned as well about elusive issues regarding school climate. Certainly it is important to know how many kids are suspended and why. But it is also important to know whether anyone says hello when a child or parent enters the building, how the phones are being answered, if a parent can get an answer to a question in a timely manner. Choice utiliizes market forces to get at some of these things–albeit in a fairly haphazard way. Involving parents directly in the improvement planning process is a far more efficient and effective mechanism for bringing about reform.

High expectations in the absence of a curriculum is a mere homily. We expect you to do well at….what exactly?

To directly contradict Mr. Williams effort to appear flexible and reasonable, choice, in and of itself, will bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. At least parental choice will.

After all, it’s not as if no one’s making choices.

Someone’s in charge but it isn’t parents. Ergo, the state of the public education system is a result of the choices someone else is making and the only someone elses I know of are elected officials and their hired help. Even the excuses made by the likes of Mr. Noguera are contradicted by all the exceptions, not the least of which is the one described by Joanne’s book, to the fondly held belief that poor parents produce poor students. Same parents, same kids, different school, different results.

I think the implication is pretty clear.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: Poor schools or poor kids? http://bit.ly/7fP893 Full http://bit.ly/5N7eON...