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Our truancy policies are similar and parents are often taken to court before the child is 16. There have been a few changes made recently to help encourage the 16-18 year olds to stay in school. To get a driver's license, the 16 year old has to be in school. I don't know that they take it away if the kid already has it and drops out though. There has been some push to change the drop out age to 18 or graduation, whichever comes first, which makes a whole lot more sense to me. I don't understand why a 16 year old would be able to drop out of school when they're not allowed to do much of anything else without parental permission, including seeing R rated movies. That's definitely a way that society can help.
The mass transportation issue is pretty unique to Detroit. Most big cities have good mass transportation. This one I'll blame on the auto industry dominating our culture here. It's not in the best interest to implement something that will hurt the industry that 60% of your economy relies on. As a result, we have really crappy mass transportation. I have had co-workers who re-located here from other places be pretty surprised just how far people generally commute to and from work and how far apart we can live from each other. It's not unusual to work with someone who lives 100 miles from you because you each commute 50 miles from opposite directions. I guess we're more spread out than many metro areas. I mean, I'm dating someone who lives an hour and 15 minutes away and we both live in "Suburbs" of Detroit. You do have to get pretty far from the city to get to anything that I'd consider rural, especially to the north or west. To the south, it's more rural.
I agree, AGDAlum that it's interesting to look at the breakdowns in different districts of the sub groups scores. It's even more interesting that the Detroit area is so segregated that in the "best" districts, there are no subgroups. In the most affluent county around Detroit, all of the special ed kids go to one district, so the other districts don't have their scores included. Oh wow, they all go to the same district that the impoverished kids live in too. It's shady, really shady. So these really affluent districts send their learning disabled kids out for special ed and there are so few minorities in these districts that don't have to separate them out. So, those districts always make AYP and get the funding. Then the district that provides all the special ed for the county and is one of the few districts in that county that has poor kids doesn't make AYP ever and loses its funding. That's definitely a flaw. That's not as true in the two other Detroit area counties though. The other two are much more integrated.
I expect our graduation rates are going to dip drastically in Michigan in 2011 when the new graduation requirements go into effect. There are just some kids that won't be capable of meeting those requirements no matter how good their teachers are or how spectacular the curriculum is. Some kids aren't going to "get" Trig no matter what you do. Unless, of course, they just get passed through. I think that's why teachers are starting to do this "100% on homework" as long as it is finished, whether it's correct or not, especially in math. If you have all 100s on your homework, you can't fail the class, even if you fail all the tests. I didn't even realize that was going on until I noticed that my son was getting 100s on all his homework but 80s on his exams. I asked the teacher at conferences about it because I was concerned that he wasn't retaining concepts and wondered if I should get him extra tutoring. That's when I found out his 6th grade teacher gave 100 on homework if it was complete, even if every answer was wrong. My bright but very lazy son figured out that if he didn't feel like doing his homework, he could just put down anything and it didn't affect his grade. However, he didn't learn the material either so he wasn't working up to his potential on tests. I wasn't letting him get away with that so I told him I was going to start checking his homework every night and that if he was doing it incorrectly, I would show him how to do it right and he would have to re-do it. Then he started getting As on tests too. I don't know whether that teacher just started doing that or if that has always been his style. I wasn't impressed with that particular teacher though.
I do think that too much pressure is being put on individual teachers to ensure that their kids perform well. Can you blame the 8th grade math or English teachers for a child who cannot read at grade level or do higher level math? It's likely that they fell behind back in 1st or 2nd grade. That 8th grade teacher can't be held responsible for what was lacking in 2nd grade.
I don't know what teacher certification requirements are in other states. In Michigan though, it's all based on years of education. Teachers get their initial certification and have to complete 20 credits of grad school classes in 5 years to keep their certification. While that does require effort on a teacher's part, I'm not sure it measures how a teacher actually teaches, does it? It seems like more of a measure on how well a teacher can do in school rather than how well a teacher can teach children.
I have always felt that our society is very messed up with our priorities and pay scales. I've said this before on this board... we pay day care workers, who care for our children, and nursing home aides, who care for our parents, some of the lowest hourly wages. While teachers are better paid than them, they definitely aren't paid enough for the importance of what they do every single day. If we really want to make educating our kids a priority and we want quality people to do it, we are going to have to look at what we pay them. Although, I guess one could argue that nobody goes into teaching for the money, they must go into it because they have a passion for it.
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