Of course in China and Korea, schools are run like dictatorships and the students there outperform most of the world. The type of school isn't the issue, it's the involvement of the parents. Try this self governing concept at some inner city school where being "smart" is considered "acting white." The problem with schools is sometimes structural, but nearly always cultural. Look at achievement levels of first gen Asian American student whose parents often arrived in the U.S. not speaking a word of English and with just the clothes on their back. Also compare DC schools that spend almost $30k per year per student and yet DC schools aren't even in the same universe as Sidwell Friends where tuition is $35k per year. How is Sidwell able to be an ultra elite school providing top notch education while DC schools spend just $5k less and are models of failure? My point is that money and new styles of doing things doesn't compensate for disengaged parents and certain cultures that don't value education as highly.
Every decade or so someone comes along and makes a "new kind of school" based around the concept of self-directed, community supported learning [1] and thinks it's new.<p>Montessori[2] wrote the book on this approach, has been around a long time and has been rigorously studied in practice.<p>This is not a novel concept. What we need to be doing is getting away from the hierarchical institutional model for governance which drives most schools into being either pre-jail or pre-industry subsidized holding pens for children while adults go do "real work."<p>Making schooling "democratic" while the rest of a nation remains un-democratic is like pissing in the ocean.<p>[1]Summerhill, Waldorf etc...
[2]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education</a>
"Poor children in developing nations often drop out after a year or two because their families don’t see the relevance of the education they’re getting. These youngsters are more likely to stay in school than their counterparts in conventional schools."<p>Reaffirming that success in school is largely due to parental support -- including approval of the methods.<p>It seems that these children are being provided education packaged in such a way that their presumably under-educated parents will accept in order to maximize parental involvement which maximizes positive outcomes -- a fantastic application of creative eduction: teach the parents and the children.<p>I wonder if children attending schools where the majority of their classmates' parents have an education at the 90th percentile have the best outcomes. That's the promise of private schools for the children of the ultra-wealthy, right?
For a school that has been operating as a real democracy since the 1960's, check out Sudbury Valley: <a href="http://www.sudval.com/01_abou_05.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sudval.com/01_abou_05.html</a>
> A 1992 World Bank evaluation of Colombia’s schools concluded that poor youngsters educated this way — learning by doing, rather than being endlessly drilled for national exams — generally outperformed their better-off peers in traditional schools.<p>Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima.
This sounds more like a cooperative than democracy.<p>Democracy:
A system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives.<p>Cooperative:
1. working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit.
2. demonstrating a willingness to cooperate :