Posted on 11/15/2006 7:03:11 PM PST by PhiKapMom
Working in the writing center today has made me extremely angry at the Democrats. I have just worked with a couple of black girls who really struggled at writing. They were intelligent but lacked basic writing skills leading me to believe that their schools never gave them the tools they need. I started thinking about how these girls went through primary school during the Clinton years--the years of supposed improvement in our schools. All Clinton did was to keep schools from being held accountable for anything. All he ever talked about was how much he "cared" about the children. Schools administrators hate Bush and Republicans because they make schools accountable for their failures.
Teachers should be able to write a sentence themselves before teaching kids how to do it. What good does a good grade do a student if their teacher is incompetent? At least standardized tests give us some sense of what kids actually know. I don't think kids should be punished for their standardized test scores, but their schools should be if too many of their kids are failing. Educators seem to hate republicans because they dare to make sure that schools are doing their jobs.
I get to see the results of Clinton's policies everyday in these students and it makes me sick!
I am one of these 'back to basic' parents. Right before we left Texas, my daughter's math teacher at a parent conference told me it didn't make any difference what the answer was as long as she got the process right. I just shook my head. I thought she was kidding, but she wasn't. When we moved up here, I asked her math teacher about that and he said you better have the right answer.
Estimating or probability in math has become a big deal. I think it is the wrong thing to teach.
To keep you a step ahead of your colleagues:
It is a horrible waste. Some of Oklahoma's rural schools are pathetic to be kind. It is a shame what they are doing to these students and I get mad at parents who don't care too.
True, true, and yet some here refuse to recognize the problem.
That's like Reading to Write that I pulled my daughter out of in 1st grade. It was horrible and that was some time ago since she graduates from college this spring.
Both of those are bad and more of the dumbing down of America by the education bureaucracy!
My DIL is a teacher and emailed the following: "I told a parent the other day during a conference that it was unfair for them to expect more from me than they were willing to expend for their child."
Amen!
Actually, they hate Republicans because, like the rest of the left, they are psychotic-detached from reality, brainwashed, and programmed to hate Western Civilization in all its forms.
It's as simple as parental A-ttitude, B-ehavior, and C-haracter...
this is a perfect example of why we cannot allow a Democrat to get back in the White House
I think, on the contrary, this rant points out the exemplar of Democrats' gains in power.
"Parental involvement is the #1 item that will make schools better IMHO."
I agree that parental involvement in children's education is key. However I respectfully disagree with the idea that having parents invest their time in the government schools is the best way to do that. For the amount of time, effort, and resources we put into the government schools, we should be seeing incredible results. But we are not.
Parents should instead focus on the education of their own children. Home education is one alternative that is providing stellar results. Private schools are another alternative. Unfortunately, too many parents who could take advantage of these options do not. The lure of "free" daycare services is just too attractive it would seem.
"Much as I hate to seem like I'm piling on, this is just one more area where GWB comes up short as prez."
I don't much blame President Bush for this, although he has had his hand in the current mess. I think the bigger problem is that both his political party and the larger political culture (including Democrats) benefit from the status quo.
On these threads, posters are quick to point out how the NEA is resisting change. And that's true. But the fact that other individuals and organizations benefit from the status quo seem to be forgotten. The contractors who build the schools, the companies who provide the books and supplies, the institutional food providers all benefit.
And it seems that very few so-called conservatives are willing to go out on a limb and state the obvious: parents should be responsible for providing for the education of their own children.
Well, I have to come to his defense, although the problem cannot be laid at Clinton's door. Many moons ago, when Bill Clinton was busy not-inhaling, I taught a catch-up class to first year Black law students at a highly competitive law school. They were amongst the first of the folks who had gone thru the education system as affirmative action students. The idea was to give them extra help in the most difficult first-year subjects.
My class started as a class in civil procedure. My students were, for the most part, bright and (from classroom dialog) understood the material.
Then I gave my first test--an essay test. I got back about 25 essays.
They were completely incoherent. By that, I'm not being cute. I mean, quite precisely, that I could not figure out what they were trying to say. Sentences were incomplete. Some of the misspellings were laughable. I couldn't buy a paragraph. And this applied across the board, including the smart ones who knew the material well.
I immediately changed the class into a basic English writing skills class (every class, we wrote about civil procedure ad nauseum) and most of my kids passed. There were no budding Charles Dickens that emerged. But, by the end of the year, you could understand what they were communicating and the paragraphs and sentences were more or less intact.
These kids had not been taught how to write, even though they were the cream of the crop amongst black students in their age bracket. All had graduated from a top undergraduate school. The white kids in their school did not share this disability.
All it took was one year of teaching the craft of a complete sentence and why we have paragraphs--and then expecting them to write better. In all but a few instances, it worked. Spelling, well . . . it's harder.
Our school system failed these kids miserably and it failed them because the system was determined to produce black graduates from top colleges. So they just got passed on thru, even though they could not write.
Then they hit Boalt, which does blind grading (the prof doesn't know who wrote the test) on a rigid curve. And, all the tests were essays. Whoops. Sixty-plus percent failure rate in the first year, which is appalling.
So maybe the original poster's comment was gratuitous. But this is a special problem in the era of affirmative action for minority students. The school system is serving its own statistics, not the students.
Apparently these kids were left behind by the NEA! Heard the crack dealer was hiring??
Pray for W and Our Troops
I did, Mom.
Unfortunately I didn't find it surprising, either.
OTOH it took an exceptional kid with real smarts like to figure out what it was they were trying to deal with & then synopsize the situation, perfectly.
...nice job, kid. ;^)
Thanks for the ping, PKM.
There are so many problems with education that the imagination is staggered. Probably the most general and basic flaw is low expectations of both students and TEACHERS.
It would be interesting to know which race students are seeking assistance most frequently.
Theodore Dalrymple: The gift of language -
For the most part, though, I was struck not by the verbal felicity and invention of my patients and those around them but by their inability to express themselves with anything like facility: and this after 11 years of compulsory education, or (more accurately) attendance at school.
LOL! That's a good one!
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