[Vision2020] RE: Logos School's Policy of Entrance Discrimination

[Melynda Huskey]

Gary Crabtree writes, apropos of Logos School:

>And yet these uneducated rubes & bumpkins manage to turn out above average 
>product. Fancy that. I would be thinking about the value of teaching 
>certification programs.

Isn't the "above average" claim precisely what's in question?

Whenever these kinds of claims come into play, a number of assumptions go unquestioned which I think are worth examining.

The metaphor of the school as factory, in which children are the raw materials acted upon by teachers to produce a product, the educated person, has always been a troubling one to me.  One consequence of this model is a rather uncritical reliance on standardized tests as a measurement of the success of the manufacturing process.  It is on this basis that I believe most comparisons of public school students and Logos School students are made, and it is an unreliable comparison for a number of reasons. 

First, these tests represent a very narrow and poorly predictive measurement of student capacity or knowledge.  For more information, there's a substantial body of research out there.  

Second, public schools accept all comers; students with moderate to severe learning disabilities, behavioral and emotional challenges, students from extremely poor homes, students with neglectful and abusive parents, homeless children, children from migrant families.  Logos School accepts only those students with disabilities so mild as to require no remediation, students whose families can afford to pay tuition.  In the language of the factory, they control their inputs in order to improve their outputs.  Public schools don't have that option--thank goodness.  But it makes comparison more complex.

Third, the success of an education depends very much on the values of the individual.  I myself, for example, would consider any education a failure which didn't include science education, including evolution and full and accurate information about human sexuality.  I want my children to learn in an environment that doesn't enforce rigid gender stereotypes.  If my children learned in their history classes that 19th-century abolitionists were God-hating monsters, and Southern slaveholders godly and tender men and women of faith, I'd be furious.  Undoubtedly, those parents who send their kids to Logos feel precisely the opposite.  For either one of us, the other's form of schooling would be woefully inadequate, if not criminally negligent.  So can we really appeal to a neutral and transcendant "successful" education?  I don't think so.

Teacher certification programs, although it's fashionable to mock them, provide a very useful framework for transferring necessary skills.  The best teaching--for example, the teaching my kids have received at McDonald School here in Moscow (a grateful shout out to Ms. Fitze, Ms. Cox, Ms. Bowe, Ms. Zirker, Ms. Sipe, and the Super-Principal, Dr. Austin)--is an art, it's true.  But there's plenty of valuable training in a teaching certificate, too.  I have the opportunity to visit several education and human development classes a semester, and I'm always impressed with the students.

Melynda Huskey