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Detroit's high schools are considered the nation's worst. Recent national comparative achievement tests found Michigan African-American students -- of which a large percentage are made up of Detroit children -- are among the lowest academic achievers among all U.S. black children. No one could rightly object to plans to dramatically overhaul these schools.
Yet within hours of the announcement Friday, detractors began their attacks, arguing Detroit is sending a message to parents that it cannot manage its own schools. That's true. The schools are nearly bankrupt, and at least two-thirds of students never graduate. Detroit has not properly managed its schools for decades. Only now is it facing that painful reality and implementing necessary changes.
Thank you President Bush for caring enough about inner city black youth to force those who would allow them to fail to do the job right or find a new line of work.
Now, if we could only develop a voucher system to replace all public schools!
I'm quite sure these problems started before Bush.
These schools have always turned out kids who couldn't get a job at Burger King. The point is we again have a teacher union throwing kids under the bus to protect some of the most ineffective teachers on the planet. Vouchers, like they had in DC before BO killed it, gave the most disenfranchised, desperate and impoverished children a shot at an education. This should be done in what is clearly one of the worst school districts in the nation. At the very least, the reorganization of the failing schools should be supported by the teachers in question.
I'm sure the school system is partly to blame but the teachers in lot of cases are overwhelmed, this problems starts within the environment the kids are brought up in. Most of the blame lays squarely on the parents of these kids, it's a viscous cycle and I've seen it in my own community almost exclusively white with plenty of opportunity for anyone. Kids with bad parents grow up to be bad adults and have their own kids who follow the same path their parents took. Kids that are able to break out of this environment either had at least one parent or another adult figure in their life that took the time to push them out of this cycle.
More often that not you hear the schools need more money but if you read this you'll see that doesn't work either:
Quote:
Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
The government can't control the parents and how they bring up and take care of their kids.
They think they can overcome that in the schools. They can't. The problems are in the home environment and the government cannot control that; no one can but the parents.
Hi I'm an educator, and from what I've noticed the biggest obstacles to a good education for all is standardized testing and large classrooms with not enough teachers. This shouldn't even be argued but the corporations who publish the books and the tests have all of you believing that American public schools suck because they fail at testing. Testing on what? nothing with substance I can assure you that. A multiple choice test can not evaluate a person's technical abilities or creative intellect. Further the tests require teachers to abandon their passions to teach what the test wants and not the educator.
What we need is to adjust our thinking. We need to throw out our philosophy on grading the students and trying to show show show what education is doing. Instead we should allow the teachers to supply us that naturally with students who we notice are learning by our interactions with them. This of course would require more teachers and ones who are well educated. I believe we desperately need to do this with our college institutions as well. We need teachers who have been through a rigorous education that is a peer reviewed education and not one that emphasizes on testing. And we do all this with money. Money we get from legalizing drugs. The war on drugs does not prevent drugs and it fuels the cartels and crime in America. After Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2002 they had 50% reduction in drug use overall, and even greater reduction in drug related deaths and crime. The youth in Portugal have been especially effected with over 50% reductions in use at ages below 18 in all drugs. Every year since decriminalization they have had greater reductions in use. When you lift the stigmatization of the problem you allow recovery. This is essential if we ever want to educate our society better we need to move from the overdosed drugged out depression we are in and that starts with the logical end to the war on drugs. The money we have invested in a failing prison system with excessively high recidivism rates mostly populated by non-violent drug crimes could pay for it all, and we would still have the military and intelligence savings to pay off our national debt. The only thing stopping us is ourselves.
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