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Honestly, I'm not convinced that, generally speaking, our schools are "failing". College enrollment has been steadily increasing since the 1960s. The type of student who used to aspire to a bachelor's degree is now aspiring to at least a Master's degree. When my dad graduated from college in 1958 with a 2.0 as a Sociology major, he could get a great job in the business field and be very successful. Even when he retired 14 years ago (before NCLB), he said there was no way he would hire a new grad who had the credentials that he'd had when he started out. There were too many candidates who had done much better than that in more relevant fields of study. Even in my middle-upper middle class high school, back in the 80s, about 20% of class went to college. In my current lower-middle middle class neighborhood, about 75% of kids are going to college. When I was in high school, there was no such thing as AP classes or IB programs. There were tracks.. "college prep", regular and "remedial", but nothing that gave us college credit before we even graduated.
So, what statistics are saying that we are "failing"? I've yet to see them.
You can take a kid from the inner city of Detroit who lives in an abandoned house with no heat and electricity who doesn't eat, except for his free school lunch, and enroll him in the best school in the state and he's not going to succeed because his drug addicted parent isn't going to support his success. The best teacher in the world just can't fix that.
My kids' school district isn't great. They seriously lack resources for gifted/brighter kids. At high school orientation, the principal spent a lot of time plugging the vocational center and very little time talking about the 6 (yeah, only 6) AP courses available. Somehow, every couple years, a few really determined kids get into Ivies or sub-Ivies. At the same time, it's not a horrible district either. There are some drug issues in some groups of kids, but there's no gang activity and there's very little crime in the area. It's an area where there are a ton of really small districts and I do think there would be some advantage to merging a couple of them. It would increase the AP/IB type offerings because there would be more students who would use those resources. I can see value in that. On the other hand, some districts are so huge that there is massive administrative overhead. Once a district has more students than some large cities, the costs become astronomical. There's a balance somewhere between the two situations that needs to be reached.
The other thought that comes to mind is... although people are always saying "you can't just throw money at a problem", why is it that the school districts with the highest funding per student are also the school districts that consistently perform better?
Teachers get paid a fraction of what most people with similar degrees make and do one of the most important jobs in our society. This trend of attacking them is making me ill. Teachers are not the problem with our society. Most of the teachers I know are far more dedicated to their jobs and put more heart and soul into their students than anybody in any other profession I've encountered.
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