Masquerouge said:
What is the teacher-to-student ratio in such a school?
There isn't a strict ratio across all Sudbury schools, but the rule of thumb seems to be 1:11 or 1:12. It's a bit more complicated than it sounds because this ratio doesn't directly determine how many staff will be there at any given moment. At my school last year we had around 60 students (it went up and down a bit over the year but stayed around 60) and about four staff members there at a time. On outings we make sure to have about one adult per 11 minors (though we'll still take just two adults for 25 kids).
Kids use the staff and interact with it both in different ways than you're used to expect in a school and in different quantity. My little brother, for his first three years in the school (he started at age 6) pretty much ignored the staff because he was busy with his own stuff and rarely ever needed help from staff. The staff is not seen as the source of all knowledge and there is no expectation that staff will spend all of their time teaching. In fact, people usually dislike it when a staff member leaves time for nothing but teaching and take that into account in staff elections.
Ball Lightning said:
Our school has 80 teachers for 1000 students.
What school is that?
ShannonCT said:
1) Only certain kinds of parents apply to Sudbury schools. They are afluent enough to afford a tuition that is beyond the means of the average family. As there is a well-documented correlation between wealth and academic achievement, students that can afford to attend private schools should be expected to do well at any school.
You'd be surprised. At my school, most families have at least a partial scholarship. Some families are not at all affluent. The variety of backgrounds you get in Sudbury Jerusalem really reflects the variety of backgrounds you get in Jerusalem well (with one exception: we have hardly ever even been contacted by Arab families from East Jerusalem, and of the one or two who did take interest none signed up.)
As an aside, the tuition at Sudbury Valley School has always been far lower than that in other private schools in the area, and while other private schools have raised the tuition over the years, SVS has only lowered it now and then. Sudbury schools are extremely cheap and efficient to run, tuition is only necessary when the school is financially independent (which SVS specifically prefers.)
ShannonCT said:
2) Parents who apply to a Sudbury school almost cetainly do so having researched the school. They already believe that the school is right for their child and that their child doesn't need the structure of a traditional school environment.
Oh, I wish. Ideally, in a perfect world, this point would be correct. Instead we usually get parents who are just fed up with every other school, or think their kid is a failure. It often takes a family years to actually accept what the school is and what it isn't, and there are even those who were involved in founding the school who still don't accept it.
ShannonCT said:
3) Sudbury schools (to quote the Sudbury Valley website) "accept all applicants who have the capacity for full participation in the school's program as self-directed, autonomous members of the school's community." With a trial period of a week or more, school officials can weed out the kids that aren't intellectually curious and would use the Sudbury system for unproductive play. By your admission, your school will put together an admittance committee if there are "issues to discuss." An admittance committee is at odds with the statement that "there is absolutely no room for selection."
Ah, I thought I might need to explain this. The committee has no power to decide not to admit a student. It can only decide to lengthen the trial period, or more importantly, it can help the Clerk clarify what needs to be said to the parents and the kid what exactly issues are. I don't even remember any specific case of the committee being called into existence, though I know it's happened once or twice.
And I think you are gravely mistaken in thinking we'd weed out the kids who play all day. Those are the best kids. Play is anything but unproductive.
ShannonCT said:
I'm just not convinced that the system would work for randomly-selected students (especially Americans). There are too many students in this country that are inadequately socialized and overly distracted by TV/video games. I'd be interested to see what would happen if a Sudbury school offered free admission without a trial period to a few randomly-selected students each year.
Well, that definitely wouldn't work, and it's not as scientific as you seem to think. It's not like when my school started it was as structured and well-established as it is now. The students were just whoever signed up, and it took us a good four or five months to establish a school culture that was more than just a big mess. This was very hard, very exciting work. Since then the school has only persisted because we try to make sure students only sign up when they actually want to be there and their parents actually accept the school. It's almost random, but we do have this one condition and so potential students select themselves. You cannot force someone to be free. It never works. The trial period is there for the student to get an impression of the school, so as to make an informed decision - not for the school to decide whether the kid should be let in. The school being composed principally of those who want to be there is not a decision slapped onto a system - it's a vital part of the system. In forcing random students onto the school you would be breaking the system, not testing it as-is.
I'm producing large volumes of text in this thread, but I'd like to link to an article about Sudbury schools from the Ode Magazine archives, which I found was a better read than the stuff I write myself, and brings in a broader range of opinions.
Link
