[brightball]

The way to get there, IMO, is a lot more freedom to experiment. Not just charters, but something closer to a startup culture.

A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own

B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids

C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate

D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.

E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.

This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.

[InitialLastName]

It only takes looking at the responses to the common core to see how resistant parents can be to any innovation in education.

"Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.

[brightball]

It's entirely different when the teachers and the parents "choose" something like common core.

My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core.

They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete transition plan for how to introduce it at each grade level, transition kids based on what they'd been taught at previous grade levels and how to inform parents about what to expect.

The key was that the teachers and admins, through their own professional expertise, were able to research options to improve how they taught and implement them with the blessing of the parents who choose to send their kids to the school. And it went great.

All of the common core horror stories that I've heard, especially around math, were due to horrible execution after the program was essentially forced on everyone. It's a completely different experience when everyone involved decides, "this is the best way and here's how we're going to do it well" vs "everybody has to do it this way now."

Common core was the main driver of choosing a private school for elementary up to at least 4th grade largely because we wanted a consistent learning experience for our kids in their early developmental years. I didn't want risk politics causing disruption in those early years (ideally ever, but early years are where I have my biggest concerns).

[InitialLastName]

That's fair, but I think it serves my point: you weren't interested in experimenting with your childrens' education.

[brightball]

I was. I wasn’t interested in other people experimenting with it. I selected the approach I was most comfortable with though.

[laverya]

> It only takes looking at the responses to the common core to see how resistant parents can be to any innovation in education.

This assumes that common core was a good thing, and that the resistance to it was thus incorrect. Which is controversial at best - retrospectives are not generally positive.

> A decade later, scant evidence exists that Common Core produced any significant benefit. One federally funded evaluation actually estimates that the standards had a negative effect on student achievement in both reading and math. Fortunately, the overall impact is quite small.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/05/common-c...

> By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/4/29/21121004/nearly-a-decade...

[kiba]

Program fails, and parents are mad/furious about their kids not learning anything and years wasted.