Schools: Episode 4

Episode four of The Story of Schools focused on the more modern age of education, spanning the time period between 1980 and the early 2000s. This was by far the easiest episode to relate to as, some of the things that they discussed in this episode were in place when we were in school. One of the parts of this episode that I found really fascinating was the part where they talked about funding in schools. I was always under the impression that public schools were funded entirely by the state and federal governments and that school’s success would influence the amount of funding they received, however in this episode I learned that that’s not always true. Before this episode I had no idea that there were some schools that received money from private businesses to help fund things like computer labs. Another part of the episode that I found really really interesting was the voucher bill, which was implemented so that poor families could send their kids to upper level schools and get them better educations. While, the bill ultimately faces more challenges than it solved, it was still something very interesting that I had never heard of before.

A cool thing that was talked about in this episode, was specialized/charter schools. Considering the hot button topic in education that is charter schools these days, hearing about them in this episode was really interesting. I never really knew exactly how charter schools came about so learning about the origins of them was extremely fascinating, especially because charter schools are only getting more and more popular, so being knowledgeable about them is key.