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May 31, 2005
Some Children Will Be Left Behind
Oakland Mayor and former California Governor Jerry Brown has a post, "Everybody to College...Don't Count On it" on education that reflects many of my own views. As Brown says,
Mortimer Adler held that every citizen required a liberal arts education and firm grounding in the basic ideas and traditions of our civilization. This is a lofty objective but tragically too many schools neither equip citizens for critical thinking, nor provide future workers with the practical skills they need.The current situation is profoundly unacceptable. It will only change when politicians stop using illusory measures to deal with the gross disparities that currently characterize our public school system.
The gross disparities that Brown mentions are well documented for California in the 2004 Academic Performance Index (API) Base Report. For example the drop out rate at the four (non-continuation) high schools in the Pomona School District range from a low of 4.8 % per year to a high of 16.1 % for the four years ending with the end of the academic year 2004. Note: these numbers do not include kids sent off to continuation high school where the dropout rates are in the 57% range or alternative high school with a four-year dropout rate of 70%! The spread between ordinary high schools in Pomona is largely influenced by economic considerations. It is not nearly as wide if one looks at the ethnic mix in each high school separately. Within a small tolerance, kids in a high school in the most affluent areas of Pomona are more likely to finish high school than those in the less affluent areas. A look at the statewide data seems to show the same thing.
There are many high schools in the country with dropout rates over a four-year period in the neighborhood of 50% or higher. Brown hits the nail on the head,
The truth is that many students--more than half in certain low income areas--don’t graduate today. Adding stringent new requirements may just ensure that many more fail to get their high school diplomas.The proponents say that schools have to create high expectations. True enough. Yet that kind of rhetoric and the decisions that have come in its wake have done nothing to stop hundreds of schools from actually generating high school dropouts. The fact that these schools do so under the legal banner of a “free and appropriate education for every child” only compounds the irony--and the horror.
It's easy to add stringent requirements and compound the teaching problem with "No Child Left Behind" goals and tests. It's hard to know what to do. It's not clear what Brown thinks the answer is and I'm sure that I don't know either. But as a society, we need to start looking at the real problems of schools, not the problems we wish they had or the problems we know how to solve. A good place to start is with the data.
These problems are real and we need "reality based" solutions.
Posted by Duane Smith at May 31, 2005 7:17 PM | Read more on Current Events |
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