Posted on 06/18/2002 6:30:37 AM PDT by summer
I've heard horrible things about the Duval County school district. I've heard this from teachers and parents both. (We are homeschooling BTW).
I’m not a teacher so I don’t know a lot. It seems to me there are a few easy answers right off the top that would do a world of good. 1. End social promotion, immediately. The child will get behind and it's pretty much over. 2. Accountability for the administration and teachers, but especially the administration. 3. Give teachers back their authority and get the difficult kids OUT of the classroom. And 4, IMHO, the number one problem is parents not giving a damn. (I won't go into how I feel about teacher unions at this time).
The reason why I feel this way is because of my experience volunteering at my children’s old school and substitute teaching. The kids who made better grades and cared about school had parents who cared how they did in school.
Government sponsored or mandatory pre-K, I feel is a waste of money. I taught my kids numbers and letters when they were 2. It's called sitting down with them and reading them books. DUH! I don’t see why we should spend millions of dollars on this, when all it takes is 10 minutes a day of quality time with your child.
The school they attended in Texas was an extremely poor country school district. This school was rated Exemplary. They dominated every year at district academic UIL meets. They excelled on the TAAS. The parents...all of us.....worked our tail ends off in PTO to raise money for the school. Our annual Halloween Carnival alone raised $20,000 a year, and we still had other fundraisers. $20,000 raised in one night in a POOR community says a lot.
The children’s success at this school I believe, had everything to do with: 1. The wonderful people they hired to teach our children and 2. Parents busting their butts to support the kids. We didn't just support our own. We went up there to read with other kids. We helped other children with their troubled subjects. It was all volunteer work and we did it because we wanted to be there. Because we cared.
Also, about the difficult kids in class……I would have never believed if I hadn’t seen it myself with my own eyes. I substituted one day in a class with a very difficult boy. Bless his heart, I’m sure he was a sweet kid, but OMGosh, he would NOT shut up, or sit down, or do his work. Every single time I gave him an instruction, he argued. Finally I very, very firmly warned him and told him to sit down. He threw his pencil. I sent him to the principles office. I was timing how much time he wasted for me and the other children. I figured we had 40 minutes on each subject and I timed him wasting 20 minutes each time I changed subjects. 20 minutes was how long it took me to get this kid to focus on the new subject. We had 5 subjects to cover that day, and he wasted almost 2 hours of the children’s day.
Sorry this is turning out to be so long. I’ve been meaning to discuss this with you for a very long time and kept forgetting to bring it up. I don't know what it takes to get a school to do better. All I know is our poor little school in Texas was awesome and it was mostly from parental involvement supporting the very good teachers there.
Now the biggest problem is: How can a government force a parent to care? They can’t. So I don’t know what it’s going to take. It seems like Jeb is doing a lot of the same things George did in Texas. I believe George did a very good job with Texas schools, despite what was reported by the Demorats.
I'm sorry this was so long and rambling. I just firmly believe more money isn't the answer. Billions are already spent and kids are still failing.
David
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