Posted on 04/01/2008 1:17:31 PM PDT by rocksblues
Three out of 10 US public school students do not graduate from high school, and major city school districts only graduate one out of two students, according to a study released Tuesday.
In a report on graduation rates around the country, the EPE Research Center and the America Promise Alliance also showed that the high school graduation rate -- finishing 12 grades of school -- in big cities falls to as low as just 34.6 percent in Baltimore, Maryland, and barely over 40 percent for the troubled Ohio cities of Columbus and Cleveland.
And it said that black and native American student's have effectively a one-in-two chance of getting a high school diploma.
"Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in America's largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss," the study said.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
OK - put down the bong and back away slooowly...
Fact: you can successfully teach Down’s Syndrome children to read and do basic arithmetic. IQ under 85 ? Yes.
Fact: in the United States over 40% of the population is functionally illiterate. Average IQ: 100
Fact: many kids “graduating” high school today are barely performing at 8th grade levels. Those who don’t graduate ? Worse, obviously.
IMO it has very little to do with intelligence and everything to do with curriculum and the quality of the teachers in 1st thru 4th grades.
If you have ever taught 5-6 year old children, all kids, even the kids with low IQs are eager, excited, and bursting to learn. By the end of 1st grade, the combination of incompetent teachers using useless curriculum puts these kids on a fast track to illiteracy.
Give every kid a competent teacher and a phonics curriculum, and you’d be back to 97% literacy in every class the first year.
I believe Brooklyn Tech was always academic — part of the Bronx Science, Stuyvesant thing.
NYC pours a ton of money into the specialized high schools and from what I can tell, it pays off. Of course, if a kid isn’t motivated, then they get kicked to the curb.
Thank you. You have, IMO, a very accurate view of the situation.
More money is useless in any grade unless the kid is equipped to make use of it. If the kids are taught by incompetent teachers using crap curriculum in K-3rd grade, and reach 4th grade without good reading and grammatical skills, they may as well just quit until they learn to read properly.
Agreed ... that is indeed the problem. Then again, you've got to make it respectable for folks to sign up to do them. Why do that, when it's easier to sell drugs, or be a gang-banger, or whatever?
No, people have to have self-respect to want to work hard at a respectable job.
That's hopelessly naive. You assume that the kids in these schools just walk through the door, ready to learn. That's a very poor assumption.
I know a teacher (a very good one, btw) who works in one of the tougher elementary schools in town. It's probably fairly mild by Detroit or Chicago standards, but even at her school the kids come from ghastly situations.
She spends a significant portion of her day just getting the kids to the point where they can think past their mother being beat up by her latest boyfriend; or the kid himself was beat up by his mother and the boyfriend; or they didn't sleep much because of the drug deal that went bad out in the hallway. Often they're considered to be a burden, and their parents just dump them for the day, and the kids know it.
A "competent teacher" in that situation will be successful if she can just create a kid who can approximate civilized behavior for a few hours a day.
Which brings us back to "poisonous cultures." The kids in these schools don't measure "self-respect" in the same way you and I do. They're more like baboons or wolves -- or the rulers of Zimbabwe.
How does one turn such cultures around?
If I had the answer to that one I could retire.
“The current system is broken and it is NOT Bush’s fault. “
I concur with all that you said. The schools are blamed for every failure of students, whether deserved or not. In the not-so-distant past, the attendance rate in most schools was in the 90th percentile. Now 80% and lower is common. In some classes of 30 or more, only one-third of that number show up on any given day.
It’s a bit better in the suburbs, but not much. I once had a student, a senior, whose mother allowed her to stay home whenever it rained (in the South).
When I don’t see them, I can’t teach them.
Then there are those who want to sleep.
Parents often support these behaviors.
It takes a village? I wouldn’t call it that, but I know that a kid becomes educated when schools, parents, and students do their part.
When things go wrong, it’s far too simplistic to blame the schools.
By the way, those dismal graduation rates? Chances are they are inflated because of social promotion and school administration who change grades on students’ cumulative record in order to pad the grad rates.
I got one better than that. I have a friend who works with the hearing impaired. She has a student that literally does not eat in the summertime. All she has is peanut butter that she eats out of a jar.
Their parents should be neutered and then hung!
They work for the government.
More than 90% of Catholic High School kids go onto college.
“Let me guess: Jackson HS in Miami?”
Close! LOL!!!
Miami Central
And if ONLY HALF of the students graduate, then it requires, on average, about $25,000 PER GRADUATE for the taxpayers to pay for one diploma. The worst case cities only getting about 25% of their students to "earn" a degree turn the figure into $50,000 - approximately. And realistically, about all they have to do is show up for 150 days a year, and reach out and take the diploma someone hands them.
That's probably not much less in dollars than a year of college at an ivy league school. And all we managed to get for that money is someone close to functionally illiterate, but with enough gumption to at least show up for 4 years.
And there is every likelihood that that student requires quite a bit of remedial work, maybe 2 semesters worth, just to barely get them up to speed for a watered-down attempt at college.
“Over a billion dollars was poured into the Kansas City, Missouri school system by order of a federal judge. Some outstanding facilities were built but it didn’t help the students’ education.”
To the extended detriment of outlying schools all around the state. I can tell you EXACTLY why this “court ordered” desegregation nonsense didn’t work but it would probably get me banned.
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I work in some inner city schools and I don’t buy that, not at the K-1 grade level. And I’ve seen some nasty stuff.
These schools have kids for 8 hours a day, from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Are you telling me in 8 hours you can’t get 1 hour of quality time from a kid ? Especially a young kid ?
That’s not what I’ve seen.
I’ve homeschooled - and I know, given even a distracted kid and 1 hour over a morning or an afternoon, you can teach a 5-6 year old kid to read and start doing addition and subtraction.
Yes, by the time you get to 4th grade or above, if you haven’t captured the kid’s attention you probably never will. But before then ? There’s still a lot of hope, given a good teacher and a good curriculum.
Boy Do we need more of this. Not every kid needs to be college prepped.
If you can weld I could get you 30.00 Plus an hour an more OT than you could handle. It certainly dosn't take 4 yrs. and tens of thousands to teach a kid these crafts. I work with a machinist and a fitter that made 126k and 145K respecively last year
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