| I'm totally with you about being excited that the topic is getting the attention it deserves - if enough people are turning heads, lending a dollar and a hand, maybe we can fix the problems with our education system. However, the hardest part about giving a lot of attention to a topic is that people who are not authorities on the subject end up with opinions about what's going on, purely based on the media or the propaganda campaigns of the bigger players. Even in examining my own perspective, I find myself dramatically in favor of destroying the teacher's union, expanding school hours and curricula, and providing more freedom to the students, so that they can engage themselves in the subject that most interests them and appeals to their strengths. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? But the problem with this is that I'm not an educator. I don't know what conditions are like and I don't know what the real challenges are - I just know what I'm being told by the media. Just as in a startup, we have a lot of potentially unproven hypotheses that need testing. This then to me is the real promise of the charter school movement - not that all of them are successful (most are not - even the ones featured aren't nearly as great as they seem, as I'm finding out from working with them), but that they represent the freedom to try new things, measure them, and figure out what does work. What scares me is that people think they have the silver bullet, rather than the silver hypothesis.
Even in making these drastic changes, if no improvement is wrought, then what?
Will people give up? Or pivot? |