Winter Garden/Windermere public schools

[WithDisp]

Originally Posted by bellhead

It's a failure of the school system as a whole, in the past there always was one or two private schools per school system. These schools were usually overwhelming white & wealthy or upper middle class plus in cities with large catholic populations usually one catholic system, & may a small private christian school. What has happened over the last 25 years is a there has been funding gap & upper middle class parents starting pulling their kids out of the school system & placing them into private schools or to move into exurb school systems where more funding could be dedicated to the school system. A good example of this is the Chicago suburb Naperville, all 4 high schools are in the top 150 overall but property taxes are over 15k a year for a single family home. A large overwhelming majority of these upper middle class parents are white, which explains why you have the demographics listed above. Another trend which has emerged are more magnet schools, which takes your best & motivated students out of traditional high schools & hurts test scores system wide for a large majority of the school system. Magnet schools give options for the lower income students in these large systems & placate motivated parents in low income areas.

To counter this large school systems go to open enrollment where you are busing kids an hour and half one way in order to meet diversity guidelines & to appease parents who want their children to go to the best schools in the system, but cannot afford to live in those areas. So you have an area like Windermere for example an upper middle class suburb where 20% of all students are bused in. I don't know if this is accurate or not I'm just stating this on past experiences. Another option is home schooling & charter schools. Home schooling works sometimes very well & other times not at all. Instead of having a professional with 7 years of training & years of experience teaching children now we are relying on the motivation of a teenager & a parent to complete assignments. Charter schools to me are used car salesman looking to get a cut of the education pie & make money on it.

There are fixes to this & the biggest one is to increase funding & lower teacher to student ratios, which is why I asked about it above. For the record my son will identify as hispanic on the census, but he looks white so the hispanic/white numbers are skewed quite a bit. A better question for education should be what is the education level of your parents? Non-college education parents students have lower grades & test scores than college educated parents.

Florida passed open enrollment, but then reneged on most of it due to overcrowded schools.

Orange District has a few 'better' schools- but the taxation and work conditions remain the same across the county- which is why those minded for public education flee Orange to go to Seminole.

The kicker is Orange has more tax dollars than any other county in Florida- but refuses to spend them on salaries or school support.

[firmbizzle]

Originally Posted by WithDisp

Florida passed open enrollment, but then reneged on most of it due to overcrowded schools.

Orange District has a few 'better' schools- but the taxation and work conditions remain the same across the county- which is why those minded for public education flee Orange to go to Seminole.

The kicker is Orange has more tax dollars than any other county in Florida- but refuses to spend them on salaries or school support.

Because they have a pipeline of educated talent coming from the Midwest.

[bellhead]

Originally Posted by firmbizzle

Because they have a pipeline of educated talent coming from the Midwest.

I grew up in Ohio & about 1/2 of all my friends who graduated college left for either Georgia or Florida.