posted on July 24, 2001 05:33:31 PM
For those of you who read and contributed to the Educational inequality in the US thread here in the round table, you may have read the article to the link I made concerning returning first-year college students from Portland Public Schools.
How to fix the education problems of our kids is the question. Do we do as the Republicans suggest and test everyone to death? Or do we do as the democrats would have us do and drown the kids with tax-payer money? Now, a new member of the Portland School Board has a third explanation …
And there you have it. What has been missing is the keen set of eyes and astute wisdom of this elected official to let us know where the situation really stands. The Mayor of Portland and a few others have expressed their own thoughts on the subject.
posted on July 24, 2001 06:40:55 PMWhat has been missing is the keen set of eyes and astute wisdom of this elected official to let us know where the situation really stands
Borillar, are you seriously presenting this antisemitic crap as a reason why students are not doing well in schools?
posted on July 24, 2001 08:04:18 PM"Borillar, are you seriously presenting this antisemitic crap as a reason why students are not doing well in schools?"
posted on July 25, 2001 05:03:53 AM
Borillar does you the honor of allowing you to take the fact that the very top people guiding the school sytem have the brain power of a cow patty and make the huge jump to the conclusion that yes that may have a negative effect on how the school system works.
Probably thought it was so obvious no analysis was needed.
posted on July 25, 2001 01:38:12 PM
No real commentary on this? How suprizing.
I would have thought that after reading the origional article that you'd note a few odd things. The Jefferson High School here, as one would suspect, is in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that are mainly comprized of black African-Americans. If any place should be held up as an example of what is wrong with public education, the Portland School District is the poster-child. What kind of school system is it that gives our best kids A+'s and Honor Roles them and then sends them out to colleges, only to discover that the diplomas weren't worth the paper that they're printed on?
So, one should at least examine the system. Yes, higher standards need to be applied; the incompetant teachers weeded out; yearly standardized testing and no social promotion; adequate funding to modernize the schools; etc. But that applies to ALL of our public schools, not just this one.
What should be striking to the reader of these articles is that it is not just the usual failure of teachers and adminsrators on kids, nor is it singly the result of bad parenting. No, it is worse than that. It is a socially accepted culture of failure that is deeply ingrained within the psyche of the fabric of our society. In this case, the singling out of a religion as the main cause of the failure of the school system and as noted in the first article, the appearent acceptance of this pronouncement by the community at large.
It is not enough to imprve funding; nor to set high standards and testing when the very society that you come from can point to someone else and blame them for all of your shortcomings. To be sure, there really is a lot of prejudicial people here in Portland (supposedly, the Ku Klux Klan was originated in Astoria, Oregon) and the problems associated with poverty and racial disparity are very real. But when it comes to sitting a child down in front of a book and tryingto teach that child something, how can one go about blaming someone else? So how can a whole society do the same?
I would have thought that someone would have noted that none of the solutions proposed by either the Democratic Party NOR the Republican Party is going to fix the Portland School District problems. And if here, in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest this is the case, then what are we going to really be doing on a national level? Is this problem so complex that we may as well use the Cambodian Solution?
posted on July 25, 2001 02:04:52 PM
I wanted to mention that my sister's kid, Scott who is having his 16th birthday yesterday, is here for a few weeks this summer. He normally lives with his dad and grandmother on Maui, a very traditional Japanese family. I wanted to relate a discussion that I had with him last night concerning the education that he is getting.
Disturbing. He related how he and his classmates felt that the teachers were so stupid. The reason for that was that one student would do the homework and the rest of the class was copying from that one student's work. The teacher seems oblivious to the problem, if he cares at all. Scott showed such distain for the teacher because of this.
I remarked to him, "So, there is just one student getting an education and the rest of you are all failures?" He replied, "Nope. I get straight A's all the time."
He doesn't get it. But he's here for a few weeks and I intend on turning his headlights on about the subject. Wish me luck.
posted on July 25, 2001 10:45:26 PM
Are you guys just finding out now that they are systematically promoting students without the basics under their belt? This has been going on for at least a decade or more. Don't you understand that they are much more concerned about hurting their students' feelings by telling them they have the wrong answers than actually making them learn the right ones? And don't forget it is much more important to teach them how awful the white man was to the Native Americans than to learn the importance of Thanksgiving to our culture.
Any wonder the number of home schooled kids grows so dramatically each year? Parents are tired of their kids being used as guinea pigs as teachers ply all the latest (and unproven) methods of estimated math and spelling. Some colleges have had to set up remedial reading and math programs for incoming freshman who cannot meet the minimum standards.
A local high school in New York State just had their graduating ceremonies for the senior class with 44 valedictorians. They couldn't have just one, you see, because that would have meant saying someone was better than the others and they certainly couldn't have that.
If you want to get rid of ineffective teachers, good luck. The unions have made tenure a #1 priority and short of molesting a child, it is impossible to get rid of anyone.
The liberal agenda has put our public schools in the toilet. In the 8 years Clinton was in office, the decline continued unabated. The kids graduating high school now were 10 years old when Clinton was elected. What was done to insure their education would equip them to become productive members of society? Schools are judged by their test scores and several weeks are devoted to practicing the tests for the optimal results. This has been going on long before Bush slid into office.
posted on July 26, 2001 01:05:31 AM
Pointing to Clinton to place blame is old hat and even cliche' anymore. I recall serious complaints about students receiving diplomas that couldn't read them during the Reagan and prior Bush administrations. And testing alone isn't going to solve the problem, nor is getting rid of the teacher's union. The problem is much bigger than that.
posted on July 26, 2001 08:11:52 AM
I am not blaming Clinton for what came before him. I am blaming him for his inaction while he was in office and adding to the continued deterioration of the educational system. And I will blame Bush if he cannot come to terms with this in his administration. We are pouring massive federal tax dollars into the Federal Education Dept and all we have to show for it is billions of dollars in misappropriated and missing funds.
I'm not advocating getting rid of the Teachers' Union. Where did you read that in my post? I am advocating getting rid of the dead wood and ineffective teachers that clog up the process. There are some outstanding teachers in our schools today, many working with maximum class sizes and minimal funds. Some under conditions that would make your skin crawl. But the pressure from the school districts to pass borderline students is tremendous. Dealing with parents who you almost have to beg to show up to parent/teacher conferences is getting to be the norm. The lowering of standards keeps the high achieving students in a perpetual state of boredom, while leaving the lower achieving students unchallenged.
We really need to cut back on administration costs and put the money into the classrooms, whether it's for building maintenance or books or teacher salaries. The classroom and bathroom facilities in some urban schools are deplorable, yet the Superintendent is pulling down 6 figures with perks to match some of the large corporations. How do you get the priorities turned around?
