[Speed Gibson,
Friday April 14, 2006 at 7:50am]
Oprah goes to school II
Continuing my previous post, I watched part 2 of Oprah's call to arms about our public schools. She profiled NBA star Kevin Johnson who returned home to Sacramento, where he established a charter school. Actually, this was a take-over of the failing Sacramento High School, KJ's alma mater, which was facing sanctions for poor performance. The remaining time was largely spent with Bill and Melinda Gates, and with Oprah continuing to beat the "crisis" drum.
I'll give Oprah some credit in that she stated the problems point-blank, without exception or qualifiers. She excused no public school, even the best, noting a validictorian who found she really wasn't ready for college. She's getting there, but is a year behind from the remedial work.
Let me rephrase that. Oprah stated the symptoms point-blank. She didn't get to the underlying problems. Words like "union" went unsaid. She really didn't get into the large amounts of money being wasted, if we can even find it. Only KJ talked about accountability. John Stossel's Stupid in America should be part III of this series.
Bill and Melinda Gates have started a campaign called "Stand Up" with a new set of three R's, which I'll cover in another post. On the show, they made one rather intuitive observation, but I'm glad they did: smaller schools perform better than larger schools. Not smaller class sizes, smaller schools. We have used Open Enrollment to sent our children to a smaller district for that very reason.
Every little bit helps, so I appreciate what Oprah has done here. She has a large, unique audience that needs to see more of these crumbling buildings and short-changed children. Would that she would bring on and challenge a union head like Randi Weingarten as Stossel did. Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths" would be another excellent guest.
I hope this just wasn't TV per se, like her New Orleans coverage. I want the Oprah that took phoney author James Frey to task.
I'll give Oprah some credit in that she stated the problems point-blank, without exception or qualifiers. She excused no public school, even the best, noting a validictorian who found she really wasn't ready for college. She's getting there, but is a year behind from the remedial work.
Let me rephrase that. Oprah stated the symptoms point-blank. She didn't get to the underlying problems. Words like "union" went unsaid. She really didn't get into the large amounts of money being wasted, if we can even find it. Only KJ talked about accountability. John Stossel's Stupid in America should be part III of this series.
Bill and Melinda Gates have started a campaign called "Stand Up" with a new set of three R's, which I'll cover in another post. On the show, they made one rather intuitive observation, but I'm glad they did: smaller schools perform better than larger schools. Not smaller class sizes, smaller schools. We have used Open Enrollment to sent our children to a smaller district for that very reason.
Every little bit helps, so I appreciate what Oprah has done here. She has a large, unique audience that needs to see more of these crumbling buildings and short-changed children. Would that she would bring on and challenge a union head like Randi Weingarten as Stossel did. Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths" would be another excellent guest.
I hope this just wasn't TV per se, like her New Orleans coverage. I want the Oprah that took phoney author James Frey to task.