Education Law

Two million more minutes

Do you remember the documentary from a few years ago titled, Two Million Minutes, where the crew followed two American suburban students and compared them to their peers in India and China (two students privileged enough to be in school in those countries, but BoardBuzz won’t get into that topic now)?  It got a lot of attention in education circles.  To sum up the film in a broad generalization, the American students came off as aloof about their education, and the students in China and India were devoted and serious about being educated.

A sequel has been completed now, and eSchool News covered it here.  The second film zooms its lens on a charter school in Arizona that apparently has all of the solutions to education’s problems (are you noticing a trend?).  BASIS Charter School starts AP classes in the fifth grade and follows the College Board’s curriculum in all core subjects.  It pays teachers to stay and gives them bonuses for students who score well on AP exams. 

It’s an interesting concept that has been played out in other parts of the country as well.  Charter schools are being given a lot of credit in urban areas for doing good things, but the biggest critique is that all students aren’t served in charter schools, only those selected to be there.  The film shows poverty-stricken children performing well on assessments, which everyone wants to see more often.  High standards are always a key in urban districts and if you’ve ever attended on of NSBA’s CUBE (Council of Urban Boards of Education) conferences, you’ve heard this over and over again.  So it’s no wonder that major business leaders say things like this:

All of the education experts interviewed in Compton’s film agreed that American children have the ability to improve their overall performance in school.

 

“I think that the children in the United States are capable of so much more than we ask of them. They are incredibly smart. They are so smart that they see exactly how high you set the bar, and that’s about all they’re willing to go normally,” said former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett, adding that if the standards are increased, students will meet them:

“We’ve just been afraid as a society to raise the level of expectation. These kids could do it. Kids at BASIS [Charter] School are taking on high school [courses]. They’re doing it in middle school. Those are not specially selected kids. It’s the same demographics as the rest of the universe. Why don’t we just accept that they can do it, and accept that as a society we need them to do it if we want to be competitive?”

 

If it’s that simple, what’s stopping us?

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on September 21, 2009 (boomark / email).