Comments on: Waiting for action

By: jj

jj — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:52:35 +0000

And in reply I assert that there have been poor schools since whenever public pundits have made it an issue. The SYSTEM was never designed to get all students to graduate. OK? It can’t be broken–in jj’s world–if it was never designed for your outcomes in the first place. It’s been a constantly evolving mutant creature, adding new limbs and organs with each passing generation of congressperson and know-it-all parent-teachers group. It is what it is. Why pretend it is something other than a mash-up which once worked but now, sadly, is broken?

I’m not defending failing schools–why are you saying I am?

How do we know some schools are not “performing,” eh? Because someone like you decides the measure of adequate performance is 100%/90%/80%/whatever % graduation rate is the measure, that’s how. Or does society at large decide we all need to graduate? And if ‘it’ does, then why the failure? Maybe because society doesn’t really exist or if it did it probably decided such a goal was just too darned hard or cost more than society wanted to spend.

What’s still true is that people with political and self-serving interests will use public education and children as pawns in their own game of gotcha politics and holier than thou gamesmanship. Will you not seriously acknowledge that such is the case? Cuz, if you won’t van, you still have to explain why, in your perception, schools fail. Maybe you will say everyone is to blame?

It might just be we have the schools we want and understand how to have.

By: van schoales

van schoales — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:28:20 +0000

Well it is true that all kinds of people use public education to advocate their own world view but that doesn’t change the fact that too many urban schools are seriously broken. There are of course many public schools that work very well but they are rarely found in America’s cities serving low-income kids.

I doubt there are many reading this blog that would consider sending their kids to most of the high schools in Chicago, LA, DC, Oakland or an unfortunately large number of schools in the Denver Metro area. Secondary schools where fewer than half graduate, most students never approach grade level reading and less than 10% are prepared for college are a fairly good indication of a system that does not work.

I’m often puzzled why there are so many seemingly rational adults that defend these failing schools as innocent victims of poverty, the district or some other greater force. The good news is that we now have a small but growing number of schools that are working for most kids in many urban systems. The challenge is how get more of these effective schools while positively impacting the low-performing schools in the districts where many of the effective schools are housed.

By: jj

jj — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:38:53 +0000

The film makes the assertion that our schools are broken. Yeah and this just in, the sky is blue. Or is it?
The sky is quantifiably scattering blue wavelengths of light more than red. I don’t see the data which show American schools to be all that bad.

It could be that we perceive the school system to be in bad shape because there are a lot of people who are invested in needing to have a broken system to advance their own world view or political prospects or even smug self satisfaction. When education became a proxy battlefield for the wars of ideology and social manipulation, we lost whatever control any system could achieve over the educational attainment of individual citizens.

I’ll see the movie–I always like good flick that confirms my own prior beliefs.