Kids who don't speak English as a first language, and who have parents who don't have the slightest interest in education. I mean, they grow up without a book in the house. Not even a magazine! It's a culture that likes talking, laughing, gossiping, screwing around, telling jokes, playing soccer, watching novellas, listening to music, dancing, partying, eating, drinking, smoking pot, chilling out... anything but reading.
Like Dude....
Lighten up, it's, like....totally gnarly dude...it's awesome.
I moved my kid to a new school here in Los Angeles this year.
You’re right, no amount of money is ever going to force Latino families to take an interest in their kid’s schooling.
I got the school’s report card yesterday, and it had an API of 953, but they only had 2% English learners.
My kid had great teachers at her old school, but the learning environment sucked. My kid is much happier at her new school.
I understand what you are saying. I am a Californian, and proud of it. I went to public school in California. It is my contention that all a good teacher needs is a chalk board, some chalk. The kids need a Big Chief writing tablet and one of those really thick pencils.
When kids in African countries can learn with teachers using the basic rudimentary of materials, then so can our students.
Fancy pants electronic devices and magic chalk boards do not an education make. The “Look-Say” method of reading is designed to create idiots in my humble opinion. The “New Math” is designed to create kids illiterate in numbers.
We learned by one block at a time. Multiplication beginning in the first grade. It was sing song, but the rote method of learning simple multiplication worked. Addition and subtraction by simple rote method also worked. We didn’t need to know why, just that it was true.
Look, before Mexicans came to California there were other cultures. I am Italian and in San Jose, there was a Little Italy around Julian Street and 13th street. Immigrants drawn to the area because it was the “Valley of the Garden’s Delight”. It the kids of those immigrants could learn english—then the kids of any other immigrants could learn english. Were Italian immigrants, the salt of the earth, so to speak, anymore literate, or illiterate than today’s current mexican immigrants? (legal or illegal) The current mexican immigrants are peasants in their homeland: for the most part, so were the italians.
But perhaps 75 years ago, the insidious program of actually “dumbing down” the population hadn’t quite taken hold yet. I know that teachers are not allowed to teach, but must hold the a strict curriculum that does not allow deviation.
More money will not solve the problem. In the 60s when I went to school, classrooms held 35 kids or more. We learned. But then again, we didn’t know that we had a choice not to learn.