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One of the advantages of living in a free country is if you don't like your school/district/county/state you are free to move to one you do like.
That reminds me of a nice quote by Anatole France - "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
Poor, uneducated, and jobless people move all the time.
You do not need an education to buy a bus ticket or an airplane ticket. And yes, poor and jobless people move all the time. One reason why people do move is to get a job or an education.
Pretty much true. A "good" school is "good" because of the high performing students who are usually offspring of higher performing (educated, high IQ) parents, who because of that, live in higher cost areas.
Teachers don't vary as much from school to school as much as students do. About the same $/student is spent in a high performing school as a low performing school.
The difference in school performance varies a lot more in a few MILES than it does between states.
Finally, it's a myth that Asians are smarter than Caucasians, Hispanics,or Blacks. It has nothing to do with their "culture". It has everything to do with WHICH Asians immigrated to the US. Typically, it is the far right side of the bell curve Asian who made it here. The Asian whose parents are PhD engineers and loaded with money. The mean of the bell curve Asian is still picking rice or turning wrenches on an automotive assembly line. Similarly, it's the far left side of the bell curve Hispanic who made it to the US. The sons and daughters of agrarian, rural, fifth grade educated, destitute parents.
You do have sweatshop Asians working in Chinese restaurants or other crap jobs in large cities. Similarly, you do have some highly educated Latinos who come here to study at top universities. The main issue is that people stereotype. Someone knows 3 Asian phd students and decides all Asians everywhere or just like them. Or someone knows two Hispanic waiters and decides all Hispanics are like that. If you go to Asia or Latin America you'll find people from all walks of life and all types of professional backgrounds.
Even in the US, there's Sonia Sotomayor, Latina Supreme Court justice who has two Ivy League degrees. You do have Hispanic politicians and executives here. Its US politics that likes to focus on the most wretchedly poor Hispanics. Likewise, in order to push the model minority myth, US politics won't focus on the Asian massage parlor girls (read prostitutes) that are found in any big city, and their Asian pimps.
A friend of mine said racism is a form of collectivism. A very dumb form. He's right.
ignorance breeds ignorance....tough for teachers to change that
with all the billions we throw at schools, how can they be this bad??
it cant be the parents can it??
is it the fine role models teenagers have??
is it culture??? have you listened to hip hop puke in the past 15 years, and the words used in thonse lyrics???????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????
and oh yes, just by asking questions,,,im almost a racist puritan
we need minority role models that tell the kids they need high school college,,,we dont need gangster rappers as role models
if drugs, fatherless families, are the root of these isues.....why is it swept under the rug??
oh,,,again,,, we have to walk on glass as to what we say-
I don't believe in role models. Ultimately its up to the individual to decide on what they want to do with their life. And yes, if you want to listen to hip hop, its your right and choice.
There is no such country that has every student be a super achiever academically. A number of people in any country will graduate from high school and get low level jobs like construction, transportation, warehousing, retail, etc. Someone has to do these jobs.
Lastly, not everyone likes to read and not everyone likes academics. You have to be good at something and actually like it to do well in it.
I have a hard time understanding why people blame school districts, local governments, racism, class inequity, etc. for a student`s poor performance. 90% of a youngster`s poor performance at school is because he/she chooses not to pursue his/her own education.
I know it isn`t popular now-days to put much responsibility on children but when they are children is when they learn to cope with responsibility. How ironic Baby-Boomers, of which I am one, stomped their feet and protested in the streets to get the right to vote at 18 and then some years later would rush to the school to defend their "Precious" when he or she had gotten themselves in trouble because he or she was "only a child". And we as Baby-Boomers seem to be moving further from rational thought each passing day when it comes to educating our children and grandchildren.
I can tell you from experience and memory why I did so poorly in junior high school and high school. It is because I was mentally lazy and I was rebellious. Being one of a large single-parent family I watched my brothers and sisters do their homework after school as I was getting ready to do more important things like go hunting or fishing or just hang out at the pool hall with my 'friends'. I was a terrible student. My actions disrupted the classrooms I sat in and kept me from learning 1/4th of what I should have. Being from a single-parent home was no excuse. My brothers and sisters all did well in school both academically and in sports. I just was not going to give school any more effort than was required for me to pass because passing was what was acceptable to my peers.
It is the responsibility of parents to make sure their kids go to school sure, because that is the law but after about the 7th or 8th grade (at least back then) the child will decide whether or not he or she will exert the effort necessary to get education. Now how do we make youngsters accept responsibility for their choices? I`m sure the motivation for each young person is different so that is something the parent will have to figure out.
But to keep throwing money at a broken system and blame each other for the disproportionate share of responsibility of a child`s failure scholastically is to perpetuate this lunacy ad infintum.
And it is unlikely to change for the better any time soon. Heck, at least one teacher poster on this thread refuses to spell properly to convey his or her thoughts to us. How in the world do we think little Johnny is going to associate life success with academic success given this type of example.
My personal thoughts are it is a great disservice to highly intelligent boys and girls to legally force them to go to school in the first place. So many more would succeed if they could get out on their own and apprentice their ways to success. So that later when they were more mature and they decided to go to school their education would mean so much more.
Having said all this though, I realize education, like crime in America are both big business so that the welfare of our younger fellow citizens will always be second place. Too bad. For us and for them.
I have a hard time understanding why people blame school districts, local governments, racism, class inequity, etc. for a student`s poor performance. 90% of a youngster`s poor performance at school is because he/she chooses not to pursue his/her own education.
Having said all this though, I realize education, like crime in America are both big business so that the welfare of our younger fellow citizens will always be second place. Too bad. For us and for them.
Where do you get a 90% figure. Even so, that assumes the teacher/chosen curriculum are presenting the kid with all the information they need to succeed. Especially for one of my kids, this simply didn't happen, and I needed to find ways to pick up the slack.
One of my grandparents wasn't very literate. None of my grandparents had as much formal education as the average schoolteacher back in the days they were raising my parents. They had a high degree of trust that the school system was, at the very least going to teach the basics. I assumed the same thing with one of my kids and it simply didn't happen.
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