However, the hardest part about giving a lot of attention to a topic is that people who are not authorities on the subject end up with opinions about what's going on, purely based on the media or the propaganda campaigns of the bigger players.
Even in examining my own perspective, I find myself dramatically in favor of destroying the teacher's union, expanding school hours and curricula, and providing more freedom to the students, so that they can engage themselves in the subject that most interests them and appeals to their strengths. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it?
But the problem with this is that I'm not an educator. I don't know what conditions are like and I don't know what the real challenges are - I just know what I'm being told by the media. Just as in a startup, we have a lot of potentially unproven hypotheses that need testing.
This then to me is the real promise of the charter school movement - not that all of them are successful (most are not - even the ones featured aren't nearly as great as they seem, as I'm finding out from working with them), but that they represent the freedom to try new things, measure them, and figure out what does work.
What scares me is that people think they have the silver bullet, rather than the silver hypothesis. Even in making these drastic changes, if no improvement is wrought, then what? Will people give up? Or pivot?
"By failure we mean the inability to properly educate our children equally and fairly."
I don't agree completely with this. By failure we mean the inability to properly educate our children PERIOD. Supplying "equal" education to the underprivileged is a sub-issue to the education issues (though it is a large sub-issue).
"One is that students are educated in order to prepare them for the world, allow them to succeed, and mold them into proper social citizens. This is the governments, parents and teachers point of view."
I wouldn't go as far as to say this is the government's point of view. The government I think has a main focus of molding people into "proper" social citizens.
"We need to discover our own purpose in order to help students discover theirs."
Good conclusion as well though it came out of left-field a bit. I agree that inspiring students should be the number one goal, and re-educating teachers first is a necessary step in reaching that goal, however difficult the task.