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terms of curriculum is to pair this kind of educational diversity with some
kind of core academic standards that all the schools must teach. That is to
say, I believe in a system in which the state or the conununity sets stan–
dards that all its schools must attain, and then leaves the schools free both
to attain them as they wish and to teach whatever else they wish in addi–
tion. That's where the charter school notion comes from. I'm pretty
encouraged by that possibility. It's not perfect, and it allows some schools
to crop up that I don't like very much. But if parents choose them for their
kids, their kids are likely to learn more in that environment than if they
had been involuntarily assigned to an unsafe school where nobody cares for
them, where they're not likely to learn to read and write, even though it's
perfectly integrated along every dimension that social engineers could pos–
sibly devise.
Michael
Meyers: Then I think there's something wrong with your defi–
nition of standards. If you go to a school, an Mrican-American immersion
school-a publicly supported school, where the mantra to the students is:
"think black, pray black, love black, speak black and be black," there's
something wrong, regardless of whatever else they're learning.
Edith
Kurzweil: I'd like to add something here. Kurt Scholz should real–
ly talk, but he asked me to do so. In Austria they do have single-sex schools,
and they have co-ed schools. And we know very well that we abolished
these so that parents and children should no longer choose what they pre–
fer. To some extent that is why we have these debates. You weren't here,
Michael, when Kurt was talking, but in Austria it's taken for granted that
all children are going to the same kind of school, that standards exist for
them all, and they all are supposed to live up to the standards.
Sanford Pinsker: I'm Sandy Pinsker, editor of
Academic Questions.
I have
a question for Rita and Chester, one I raise on behalf of my wife, the
director of an International Baccalaureate program in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania that'll be off the ground and running next year. You said a
number of kind words about charter schools; I wonder if you had at least
one or two kind words about International Baccalaureate programs. When
my wife goes out to middle schools to "recruit" or pass the word, the bad
news is that students out there apparently have not read
The Adventures
if
Tom Sawyer.
The good news is that if you tell them this program isn't for
everyone--you've got to be very quick and very disciplined and willing to
do lots of hard work-they all say, "Me! Me! I can do it! I'm interested!"
Set a challenge to these kids and at least initially they're interested, even
though the number of students who will successfully complete the program
