School System Improvement: Public vs. Independent Education Dichotomy between the Rock and the Hard Place; in the Lenses of an International Educator and a 16 Year-Old US Teenager

One of the most robust findings in years in education, research, and policy implementation is that some policymakers usually know shockingly very little about education per se; and problems for which they purport to make policy. Striking to note is the gap between what one observes regarding accountability, overinvestment in testing, underinvesting in capacity building, and frail knowledge on turning around failing schools in the wake of over-crowded classrooms. Lest we forget; there could be tons of highly educated professional educators with plenty of BIG ideas, but simply accompanied with weak political authority and zero influence. Why? Well, partly because they are fragmented professionally and lack strong cooperative theories on how to improve the enterprise. At the bottom of the societal academia ladder, are parents and students who usually; are people to whom things happen. The degree of separation between school improvement, problems of educators dealing with accountability systems in a non-sympathetic public discourse, plight of vulnerable students transitioning from elementary and middle school to high school, parents, and some policy makers of whatever ideological stripe who find complaints of educators about linear accountability to be out of touch and whiny; is astronomical. This phenomenon of high-performance educational knowledge treats people in learning environments ? adults and students alike ? as “learners”. That voids labels like “failing school” with bad teachers and bad students and/or “achieving school” with good teachers and good students. We are all learners and do not learn in one-size-fits-all, tailor-made, incremental, linear fashion. Guided by our individual differences, we dissect and tear down stereotypical old preconceptions, try out new cognitive demands that stem out of our cultural practices, and inject affective and behavioral responses into operating framework(s) at both the individual level and collective universal model. This article re-visits and de-constructs mythologies of public school versus home schooling.