Out Of District Schools Of Choice: Fill & Download for Free

Public school: Redwood City School District offers Mandarin Immersion program for Transitional Kindergarten, Kindergarten and first grade starting Fall 2015 at John Gill Elementary School. It is a School of Choice program which means out-of-district parents can apply. There is an information session coming up on December 7, 2014 Mandarin Immersion (School of Choice) Info Session @ John GillFor more info, visit the parents organization FB page:Mandarin Immersion in RWC

The other answers covered quite a bit, but as a teacher in an urban environment for many years, let me just go over some of the other practicalities involved in school choice.One of the “choices” never covered is how a student might get to the “school of choice”. If they choose to take a bus, the student could be on public transportation for 1.5 hours a morning, just to GET to school. How else would they get there? Charter schools are often no where near where the student lives, and I've known MANY middle school students travel that far to go out-of -district.Now, children with “means” have no problem with this. I know what happens to children without means. We pretend things are equal. We pretend this will benefit everyone. We all know better, don't we?

While I’m not a fan of Trump, as a public school teacher, I can attest to many of the problems with the public school system that the president alluded to. Some of these I’ve chronicled in previous answers.I’ve worked at public schools where I wouldn’t send my own children. These schools were not underfunded or understaffed. The district didn’t deliberately staff it with incompetent or burned-out teachers. The textbooks were the same as the textbooks in wealthy suburban schools, and in many cases the technology was better. But these schools had numerous problems that made them unsafe and made the education inferior.Poor discipline results in more disruptions from learning. In two of my classes, I have two students who are so disruptive and off-task that I’m practically sacrificing any student I seat near them. Since I have 39 students in a very small classroom, I can’t put either off by themselves. If I send them to the office for their continuous off-task behavior, they’re sent right back. So someone has to sit next to them, and that person’s education is being harmed.That same poor discipline increases the chance that a student will be bullied, hurt, or in extreme cases, killed. Every day in American public schools, students are bullied, intimidated and beaten up.I spent the first decade of my teaching career at rough middle schools in gang-infested neighborhoods. I saw teachers get sick from stress, break down in tears and even have nervous breakdowns. Once, during state testing, a teacher ran through the halls yelling, “Let my people go.” Some of these teachers disappeared. Some burnt out and stayed on the job. They weren’t bad people, they just went through the motions of teaching until they could get a pension.In some public schools you’ll find unqualified teachers in some academic areas. Private and good public schools will be staffed with brighter teachers with degrees in real academic areas like Math, Biology, History, etc. At under-performing schools, you’re more likely to find teachers with degrees in Education, which are a joke. One former colleague of mine had BA and MA degrees in Education and didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor (this teacher actually thought the U.S. dropped the atom bomb on the Japanese at Pearl Harbor). He was hardly the dumbest Ed major I’ve met. The more Education majors teaching in a school, the lower the quality of education.An anti-knowledge bias has led to the deterioration of the curriculum in many, if not most, public school systems. I’ve written about this in previous answers on education, but it’s a real problem.In many areas, the only way for a child to escape from such a learning environment is to go to a private or charter school. But, here in California, the legislature has passed laws to make charter schools just as ineffective as public schools. So that just leaves private schools.Don’t get me wrong. I’m a career public school teacher. Every day I go to work and try to do the best for my students. But the system is cheating my students out of the quality of education they deserve. And it’s definitely not keeping them safe.