Schools: there is not one style

Schools don't have to be the same!

Why does everyone thinks the word school has to have a unified vision. No one thinks the word business means the same thing. Big, small, public, private, different management styles, different production models, some produce things, some manage things, some sell things, it goes on and on...
Just like we all don't need to eat vanilla ice cream, we want it our way.

But for some reason we think schools should be the same thing. Four walls, teacher upfront with chalk (now dry erase marker), text books, photocopies, etc, AND ONE METHOD THAT WORKS. The notion is ridulous. There has never been one thing that works for everybody, maybe water? How about we agree that everyone is right.
Montessori is right.
Waldorf is right.
Public is right.
Private is right.
Christian is right. In fact all religious schools are right.
Home schools are right.
Farm schools are right.
And all the other models of education are right.

Now let students, parents, and families CHOOSE what is best for them.

Clearly the model of public education works for some students! And that is great. Clearly Waldorf works for others. As an educator I can learn being in a Montessori classroom. I love seeing technology being integrated into classrooms. I love and learn from these things because I see students getting excited to work with information and grow.

Public education would take monumental leaps forward by injecting more methodologies into the mix, not creating a standard script.
And yes you would loose number to standardized tests, but who cares. They are indicative of very little. Finding superman missed its own point. World test scores are indicative of anything.

The gentleman, Anand Giridharadas, on John Stewart last night brought up the most compelling factor about India and China. He wrote "India Calling". It had nothing to do with test scores. It was about the fact that nationalism and the belief in hope were growing in India and China, while distain and antagonism is growing in the United States. That will bury us, not Math Scores.