There is a movement in the States toward better education.  At least they’re becoming aware that their education system is no good, but, when they compare the abilities of the blacks vs the whites (as they refer to themselves) they miss the fact that even the whites get a poor education over in the States.  My daughter helped a grade 12 graduate ready herself for her exit highschool exams.  So easy!  eg, what is a noun—very low standards.  The only way my daughter could help btw was because I taught her grammar at home—she never saw a grammar in her Ontario school.
As long as parents are dissatisfied, improvements will come about, and in the States the outcome will eventually lead to education getting better for all ethnic groups.
It’ll be really great when Ontario parents and taxpayers begin to catch on to how bad our educational system is, as the results will be the same.  I wonder what it will take?

What’s becoming obvious to me is all of the myths that the unions and anti-choice folks like to spin about the future of choice being decided by those who can afford it are pure hogwash.

The more I read about choice in the states and in provinces in Canada the drivers of more choice for better education is coming from the other end of the economic spectrum and those who can least afford it but want the same darn thing for those kids whose parents can afford to choose outside of the system.

Well, how many parents want choices and what kind of choices?

I have been consistently surprised to find out that while a lot of parents are relatively unhappy with the education their children get, their unhappiness is more about more attention for their child or about details and not about the fundamentals.

Really, there are a lot of parents out there that as long as they hear positive things about their children and as long as their child seems to do a bit better than the others they don’t seem to care about how much they learn.

They take comfort in the belief that it is a different, new world today where “old learning” doesn’t apply and that all the kids are in the same boat so their child would do what the others are doing and they seem to have turned out ok in the past, so why worry?

I think there are 3 main reasons for this:

1) Most parents have had a “progressive” education themselves so they don’t see much wrong with the current approaches to teaching.
Quite a few of them actually believe that learning should happen “naturally” and if it doesn’t they tend to think that it wasn’t meant to be, that their child’s abilities lie somewhere else

2) “Cognitive disonance” when we behave differently than our beliefs is very uncomfortable so if we can’t change our behavior then we change our beliefs.
So I think in a lot of cases what happens is: you’ve heard that the schools are not that great, but what options do you have and how bad can they be?

You enroll your daugther in the public school. First year is sort of ok, hard to judge anyway what’s performance to expect at that age. So if everybody says that it’s normal to have big variatons, and that a lot of children do not read yet, you give it another try. The second grade is not that great, it becomes obvious that your daugther is not reading very well, is not writing very well.
What are you going to do?
Tutor her every night? Sure, if you know how and you make the commitment to make time for it. 
Pay for tutoring? Sure, if you can afford it and you have the stamina to press nicely and consistently for it, because let’s face it: what child wants to do what they perceive as “extra work” in their free time.
Pay for private school? Sure, if you can afford it and you can find one that is good within reach.
These are very tough choices and very few parents can make them consistently.
So, one rationalizes, well, my daughter has an attention problem, and the sports activities at the school are really good so maybe my daugther will learn perseverance through sports, and maybe next year when she’ll have matured more she’ll have a better teacher and catch up… and so on and so forth ...
Are you going to tell yourself that you were too naive to figure out what was going on?
Or that your priorities are such that you cannot make the hard commitments of time or money or both because it’s too hard? Very uncomfortable.
Some parents indeed have no choices.
The majority do have some but they require consistent commitments that are very hard when life is very busy with work, commuting, activities.

3) There is comfort in being part of the crowd.

If you read “Influence - Science and Practice” by Robert B. Cialdini, I’m sure you’ll find more examples as to why parents haven’t reacted more strongly already and as to why the current education myths have such a strong hold.

From what I have seen, parents stop being apathetic the moment there is a true possibility of choosing a better school for their children - for an example, look at the school choice rallies in Florida with thousands of participants. It may be that Ontario parents correctly perceive that they would be wasting their time - or maybe even making things worse for their kids - if they started complaining about their children’s schools.

The last two blogs have brought back memories of what parents were like in Singapore.  No one seemed to say ‘boo’, but one yr after March break, my son’s class suddenly had (if I remember correctly) five new students who had been taken out of the American school in Singapore. 
Parents had so much clout at the International School of Singapore, that the elementary principal used to come to me (the parent spokesman) and ask me to approach the Head Master about different issues.  They were always for to the benefit of the children, so I would.  The point I’m making is that I had more sway than he.  Even with this amt of power parents were silent, but their actions spoke much louder than their words.

Well, choice, real choice not just a sprinkle of alternative schools would have a chance to start changes rolling.

The “progressive” ideas have taken so much hold and parents have got so used to the current situation that most parents would expect and want special attention to their children and quite a few would consider that direct instruction kills creativity.

That’s a big part why - on the average - the private schools chosen by parents do not have clearly better results than the public schools. A lot of them use “progressive” teaching styles, have classes where students are at different levels or mastery.
So while they may teach more carefully and the discipline may be a bit better, the fundamentals are similar.
This has baffled me. The only explanation I could come up with is that on one hand that’s what (most?) parents want and on the other hand this is the only way the schools can accomodate students starting with the school that are behind or have special problems.
Despite the perception that the private schools “skim” the good students that’s not true. Academic schools do take in students that are behind and students with problems. How do they accomodate them? Differentiated instruction.

Europe, I think that over here most Canadians don’t realize how poor our schools are, and this may be one of the reasons why there isn’t a mass movement to bring about change.  NA is huge, and the educational system is bad throughout.  I’m well aware of how bad it is because, as you know, I’ve had my children enrolled in schools in Asia.  This experience taught me that in a good school children continue to thrive the same way that one sees an 18-month-old thrive—that’s what I saw in my children when they were in school in Asia.  Over here my observation was that many of the children looked ‘wilted’ (for lack of a better term) and unhappy.  These were children who on the wkends were very bubbly.  It’s very hard on a child not to learn, and they certainly don’t understand what the problem is, and in most cases, parents & teachers, place the blame firmly on the children’s shoulders when they’re not learning/thriving—that’s quite a burden.
Also over here, there isn’t the drive one sees in Asia to get a good education.  There they know that an education is a ticket to a better life, whereas over here, an illiterate adult can still afford to buy a house and a car.  Is our consumer wealth why we parents in NA are apathetic about our children’s education?  Our economy is not going to remain this strong, and I wonder if the attitude of parents about their child’s education will shift when the economy begins sputtering and slowing down…

Totally agree with you Bev, children are “wilted” and bored out of their minds.

The praise they get for every little thing they do also makes a lot of them praise junkies and unable to persevere when things get even a little bit harder.
We are severely handicapping them because once this kind of habitual mindset gets established is - like any habit - extremely hard to change.

Leaving aside that I think we should be educating citizens I don’t think it has hit yet in North America that our kids will not compete for “good jobs” with other kids here, they will compete with kids from India, from China, from the Phillipines.

It is mindboggling to see how little a lot of our kids know and how self-assured they are and how they say with pride that math is not their cup of tea and that French sucks since who needs French anyway? It is a badge of honour not to know much about anything and to act bored about anything that isn’t related to their own interests.