Comments on: Some Children Must Be Left Behind

By: Boiler Installation

Boiler Installation — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:39:14 +0000

there is a growing problem where i live to. I was going to go into the teaching profession. Given how society has changed so much in the last decade. the youngsters are totally different now in terms of attitude than they were a decade ago.
this is a social problem and has greatly affected the teaching industry.

By: Inchirieri Auto

Inchirieri Auto — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:32:00 +0000

We know how young children learn how to read. It’s called phonics. We know how they learn to cipher. It’s called arithmetic. We know how they learn to write. It’s called reading. I would be happy, happy, happy to debate anybody at any time and any place who takes issue with these timeless truths. Most of our children can master these things by the age of fourteen or so. I can give you many examples of schools, from 1940s small towns (or, for that matter, 1630 small towns) that did this and continue to do it very well. I’m the President of the Board of a small charter public school that simply by giving homework, teaching our teachers how to teach, being unburdened by unions, having no special advantages of class, race or gender, that in just a few years has produced test scores among the highest in our state

By: Rent a car

Rent a car — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:31:00 +0000

know, we can take the teachers who cannot be fired and put them in charge of the dear kiddies who cannot abide the school system.

Give em knives, guns and bullets and maybe two problems shall be solved at once. I’d fear for the sub-par teachers in this gambit, the youth are in better physical shape but I know their Union shall come up with some helpful tool to create a fair fight.

By: Electronic Cigarette

Electronic Cigarette — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:44:00 +0000

The problem with this is that you aren’t helping anyone out by keeping around a student that doesn’t want to do the work. You make it harder for that child, harder for the teachers, and harder for the students who actually want to learn.

There is also the fact that they will likely not show up even if you don’t allow them to drop out. I remember that here you weren’t allowed to drop out until you were 16 and there were all kinds of people who rather than dropping out just stopped showing up at 14 or 15. While its incredibly sad you can’t force them to be there.

By: Franklin Evans

Franklin Evans — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:18:27 +0000

A cautionary tale, and I’m sorry to come late to the comments. I’ll just add that while not necessarily disagreeing with most of the specific points, it can come down to a simple shift in the semantics.

Instead of real “improvements in student achievement” I submit we should start with real improvements in serving the needs and potentials of the student.

The author touches on this indirectly at several points. The linear value judgments are forced on the children, reinforced by irrational parental expectations, and abetted by politicians and politically-sensitive administrations. A parent can hope for the best for the child, but as soon as the parent imposes what will be best, instead of working up to knowing what the child is capable of achieving, that child will be lost.

By: The Jungle Cat

The Jungle Cat — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:21:26 +0000

I agree completely. In fact, much of the problem with the current state of education in general is this Factory-Style-One-Size-Fits-All approach.

By: Robin Datta

Robin Datta — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:46:50 +0000

The requirement to attend school until their 18th birthday or receive a high school diploma tethers the more competent persons to the herd. What if the person does Master’s level work before the age of eighteen but disdains a high school diploma?

By: JD

JD — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:09:52 +0000

I quit highschool halfway through my senior year. I went and passed a silly state test, and got a silly piece of paper. I went to college a few times, but realized how most of the college education is also worthless as well (unless you are pursuing a science, or an academic career).

I’m a software engineer now. I always loved to learn, but I always hated school. How was I able to become a software engineer? Well after suffering through the pain of crappy jobs like bagging groceries, I decided I actually wanted a better life.

I always liked computers, so when I decided that I ‘wanted’ to learn, I was able to.

It is the freedom to fail that creates the possibility of success. Let kids drop out. Let them find out how hard life is. Let them make mistakes. It’s the only way they will realize how important education is. And when people want to be educated, you won’t have to lock them in the classroom.

Liberty leads to mistakes and mistakes lead to wisdom and wisom leads to success.

By: Spiffy McBang

Spiffy McBang — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:46:47 +0000

If your suggestion is to leave the legal dropout age at 16, I agree. If you think a 13-year-old should be able to leave school, I don’t. It’s possible a kid will have a change of heart between 16 and 18 if forced to attend school, but not at all likely. Between 13 and 18, however, a lot can happen.

A situation like Trey’s requires there be allowable exceptions to the rule, not a change to the rule itself. I don’t think it likely you’re going to find more than a small handful of 13-year-olds (I’m inclined to think none at all) with normal learning ability who should reasonably be allowed to drop out of school because there’s just no purpose to keeping them around if they don’t want to be there. Serious learning disabilities are not a normal situation and should be handled outside the regular rulebook.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:13:25 +0000

Perhaps what is needed more than compulsory attendance is a nice set of Oak Pillory at the entrance to the school . Students are allowed two trips to them for disruption and malingering and if there is a third infraction, they are summarily shipped off to the White House Fellows program as preternaturally inclined toward sociopathy.

By all means, there should be a set outside the teachers lounge as well. Here, boredom meters shall clang if the teachers fail to keep their pedagogical efforts compelling and if they exceed two trips to the Pillory, they will be shipped off to Hollywood to write Television scripts for minimum wage.

By: John Willson

John Willson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:35:24 +0000

By: J.D. Salyer

J.D. Salyer — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:47:24 +0000

“In a state always sensitive about its literacy rates and low test scores, the legislators want no more 16-year-old dropouts.”

I sometimes wonder how much of the nonsense going on around here can be traced back to nothing more than insecurity.

Excellent observations.

By: Carl Scott

Carl Scott — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:57:54 +0000

Kentucky, Kentucky, DON’T DO IT!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m a former secondary teacher, folks, and one of the few things making troubled public school districts manageable is the unforeseen blessing that occurs when some asshole “student,” who’s been a plague to his peers, his teachers, everybody, for years on end, decides to drop out. A lot of it happens sophomore year, and you can almost hear the behaved students, the serious students, breath a sigh of relief.

Man, oh, man. Do not get me started on this. READ Theodore Sizer’s two books on “Horace” and school reform. READ that old Verso Marxist book called Youth and History (forget the author–Gillis?)

Slogans:

Add More Kick-Outs to the Drop-Outs!

The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few.

Teenage-dom is an Opiate

Teachers, Not Babysitters!

Achilles (Fill in the Blank–Franklin, Galileo, Aquinas, Churchill–)Didn’t Need No Stinkin’ High School and He Wouldn’t Have Stayed Put in One.

There Is No Such Thing As a Right to an Education. Nor Is There A Right to Be A Punk Who Gets Thirty Referrals Every Year And Still Gets to Go to “School.

See, I think education reform #1 is tougher discipline. Vouchers are a side-show. You start with massive reform that makes it near-impossible for lawyers to go after schools for kicking repeat serious behavior offenders out FOR GOOD. Go work at Taco Bell, asshole, if they’ll hire you. Get a taste of reality. Repent, and talk to those folks at Dalton’s church. Come back for a GED when you’ve settled down. Yes, a necessary component of this reform would be fostering better adult-education opportunities, and perhaps also beefed-up juvenile sections of police departments. But trust me, nothing would send test scores higher than such a reform. But people gotta get past this “throwaway kids” and “untouchable right to education” rhetoric that denies the reality of free-will.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:25:31 +0000

In my years dealing with engineers, I noticed that no small number self-selected into engineering and a primary reliance on mathematics because they suffered from varying degrees of dyslexia. Some of these folks had poor verbal abilities but were extremely smart and intuitive on many levels. I envied their facility with complex engineering methods. One of the deficiencies of public education ..and it is only getting worse with the standardizations of “NCLB” is that it is not interested in ferreting out and dealing productively with the various forms of intelligence from the intellectual to kinetic to mathematic/dyslexic to physical to lingual etc etc. Perhaps customization really is too much to ask for but it would seem to me that it might create happier people and a more widely skilled polity. Standardization is great for the inert, with humans, equalization reduces quality, canceling out the benefits intended .

By: John Médaille

John Médaille — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:21:44 +0000

Mitzi, I can understand the frustration of the dyslexic student in the below normal class. Dyslexia presents a learning difficulty, but it is not a sign of impaired intelligence. By way of full disclosure, I am a mild dyslexic and had difficulty in learning to read. While some may point out that this contradicts my thesis that impaired intellect and dyslexia are not connected, I respond that one of my sons is a severe dyslexic, and he took remedial reading AND advanced algebra at the same time. He recently graduated with a Master’s in literature from CUA. He was fortunate in having a mother who is herself a teacher, and could work with him. It was a struggle of epic proportions, but she not only taught him to read, but to love literature.

By: Mitzi

Mitzi — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:43:07 +0000

I agree with the author of this essay. I taught many students of varying abilities as a seventh and eighth grade math and science teacher across the hall from CDC (relatively severe) and down the hall from ERC(milder) special education classes. They sent their students with assistants to my room to learn to interact with normal peers during activities, even if they could only watch or follow instructions from other kids. One year I had a dyslexic male student who was sent to my science class as a behavioral reward. He was on the edge of severe behavior problems as a child of normal intellect in a class for below-normal kids. We pulled him into my math class, and I discovered that his father (a successful local construction contractor) was also dyslexic and illiterate. I asked him how he succeeded and what math I should teach his son. He asked me to teach his son mental math, and told me that the boy had already expressed interest in the construction business. He could hire a secretary to write letters and contracts while he did estimates in his head. The math was the important thing. Formal, systematic mental math instruction made a valuable addition to my curriculum and helped my “normal” students as well. The student was already apprenticing informally on week-ends and during the summer. It should be an option for other kids as well.