How My School and District Failed its Students
anurbanteacherseducation.com
How My School and District Failed its Students
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Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#2My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything.
Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences (imagine how you might react to such a stance against thermodynamics or the inverse square law).
Edit: if you disagree, say why instead of just voting me down.
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#3My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
I couldn't concur more; some students are just not mentally or emotionally prepared for school. Forcing them to attend is stressful for them and for the people around them. The ideal solution, to me, would be two-pronged:
1. Stop forcing people who don't want to go to school to be there.
2. Make it easy for people to change their minds and return to school later.
I think #2 is absolutely necessary if #1 is to be implemented. Appropriate programs would have to be available for older students to continue their education, and they'd have to be available on a subsidized basis.
My only concern about this whole line of thinking is the issue of parents forcing their children to leave school against their will and work instead. I haven't been able to come up with a convincing solution to that problem yet. I feel certain that the current system is undesirable, though.
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#4My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
The problem is that some students could do fine in a structured environment - but at the age of 13, would you have voluntarily chosen to go to school? I'd be sitting at home, learning to program and losing what little social development I had at school. :)
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#5My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
I didn't downmod you, but it wouldn't work. It's a typical engineer's solution, you know? Sure, if you have 1 bad nut in a collection of 10 nuts, you just throw it away. But that's politically impossible with humans. The newspapers and the electorate would destroy anyone who tried it. At best you might be able to steer the no-goodnicks into the basement for "special" classes, but you could never, ever make your real intentions known, and so you could never have a genuinely effective system for filtering.
The old-style solution was much simpler: The principal beat the kid. The kid would go home, and father would beat him a second time. This also doesn't work for similar reasons.
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#6My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws
I didn't downvote you, but I strongly disagree. I personally don't want to live in a society full of kids (did you see his percentages - up to 25%!!) that are considered unmanageable at age 12. If they are unmanageable at age 12, what do you think they are going to be at age 25? Angry, illiterate, jobless oh and yeah, still unmanageable. Or, in jail and unmanageable. Can you build enough jails for 25% of the population?
There are no easy answers to the problems of universal education, but let's not forget why it is there in the first place.
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#7My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
It's an interesting position, but may still leave you with the same problem. A fair proportion of the disruptive students actually want to be at school (since that's where everyone else is) -- so even if you make it voluntary you will still get students being disruptive. In the end you still come to the conclusion that you have to enforce the rules to make education effective. (Also, anyone who's ever watched a normally well-behaved classroom in the hands of an inexperienced substitute can believe that discipline makes a difference!)
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#8My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
Ha. The pickle here is that we (the government, the bleeding hearts, those capable of compassion) have to acknowledge that these kids were dealt a pretty bad hand, and that they are, after all, still kids. So we owe them a fair shot and some patience -- it's not acceptable to give up on them as products of the system. Because in one way or another we're part of the system. And they're kids.
My sister participated in the New York Teaching Fellows program (similar to TFA) and worked in Spanish Harlem and her experience was much the same as the author's. So I'm not saying the current situation and the current programs are ideal or well managed, but there are interesting hope-inducing projects and people out there.
p.s. Go watch season 4 of The Wire and see if it tugs at your heartstrings a bit. It also paints a good picture of how screwed up the school system itself is in poor urban communities. Not to mention how pedogogical innovation is treated in the academic setting...
p.p.s. If you're curious about the role of academic philanthropy and the Broad Foundation which the author mentions, have a read: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 . I haven't read a counterpoint to that piece yet, so I'm not sure how well the criticisms stand up.
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#9My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
In what way would it help society to have more uneducated young people hanging around?
Re: How My School and District Failed its Students
#10My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything. Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences…
Just to play devil's advocate, if you remove truancy laws, aren't you effectively turning disruptive students in a semi-controlled environment into disruptive people at large? It's not as if most of these kids are full of potential and just aren't getting reached by their teachers or schools. I bet that the kid who threatens to beat his teacher's bitch-ass is probably going to continue to behave unacceptably outside the classroom if you remove the expectation that they have to stay there. How do you manage this new source of unacceptable behavior that was previously contained in schools?
Do kids who would have been truant give up some of the legal protections they enjoy as minors? Do we set up some sort of public "work camp" in lieu of schools for kids who aren't manageable in the classroom? It's not as if these kids have parents who will take responsible custody for them - that's a huge part of the problem. I'm not sure what the best answer for society is, but I'm not sure you're quite there with your suggestion.
I'm not saying that your idea doesn't have some merit, and I agree that there are good kids getting screwed because they are stuck in crappy schools. But I think that unleashing the worst of that demographic from the only "responsibility" they might have is a dangerous idea.