Posted on 02/28/2005 9:06:06 PM PST by baseball_fan
...America’s high schools are obsolete.
By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded…
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
…
Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.
The other two-thirds…are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job – no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.
This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.
…
When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science …
By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations.
… the U.S. college dropout rate is also one of the highest in the industrialized world. …
… In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many...in engineering.
…
… The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college – and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at gatesfoundation.org ...
That's a real shame, isn't it? There was a time in this country when anyone who truly wanted to be considered educated devoted themselves to studying the Great Books and the trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric). I'm just glad that there are teachers out there who are dedicated to keeping this tradition alive.
"There's nothing stopping him, from demonstrating his point, and leading by example."
Well, if he were claiming to be a teacher ......
What some of us are trying to say is that education must be more than just a "technical" education. Many of the present generation are terrific technically but unable to think logically. Think about the possible correlation between the techies in the SF Bay Area and this area being the bastion of liberalism. See post 95 regarding the type of education that offers some hope.
The teacher who founded this charter school wanted to open it in my county. He was constantly thwarted, not only by school officials but by town planning boards which changed their policies overnight about where alternative schools could be built. It must have been very frustrating for him. People in my county just love their cutting-edge, progressive, multi-culti public schools, and the feeling is that if parents aren't happy, there are always private schools. Unfortunately for so many parents, they are paying such high school taxes, there is no money left over for private school tuition. So much for public school choice.
He finally gained permission to open it in the next county in an old Georgian-style mansion. It attracts the children of immigrants and lower middle-class blue-collar workers, as well as minority children from the inner city. They do quite well on their state-mandated tests.
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