Posted on 09/04/2012 1:11:48 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Condoleezza Rice’s remarks at the convention on K–12 education were not helpful. She said that she can tell from the ZIP code whether or not a child will get a good education. But many children in every ZIP code are managing to get themselves decently educated because they are well behaved and studious and take advantage of what is on offer. Many Asian immigrants, for example, are doing well even in relatively bad schools. This is not to say we shouldn’t demand better schools but just to correct the overly bleak and fatalistic picture that Rice presented.
Rice also said that we need great teachers, not poor or mediocre ones. But we need tens of thousands of teachers, and more of them every year, to teach our millions and millions of children, including huge numbers who come from fatherless homes, and many who have no English, have never been in school, and arrive as older children and teenagers. The chances of those tens of thousands of teachers’ all being “great” are very slim. What we want are good teachers, and teachers who work hard and try to improve themselves. But we can’t expect every teacher to be “great” in a public-school system as vast as ours, with the challenges presented by the student population as well as current pedagogical and ideological theories (students must be encouraged to construct their own knowledge, be free to decide for themselves what is right and wrong, etc.). We have very few secretaries of states, and even there, we can’t demand that they all be great, and are grateful if they are at least competent and don’t make things worse.
She should check out why the child lives in that ZIP code. Maybe she will find that it is uneducated one or two parents. If the parents do not value education the child has two strikes against him.
Students will get out of school what they put into it.
If students have no discipline they will get almost nothing.
What we need to do is stop pandering to students who do not want to learn, Separate them from those who do want to learn.
It isn’t the zip code that decides who learns and who doesn’t it is the shool board that allows disruptive students to be disruptive.
Education should stop being a right, and become a privilege. A privilege for those who wish to excell.
Students in any zip code from 00000 to 99999 are being cheated thanks to the NEA and the Progressives who want dumbed down Cretans willing to vote in the Marxists on the promise of more from somebody else.
There are very, VERY, few “good” government schools.
The vast majority range between mediocre and “hell-hole” status. Regardless of zipcode.
Yes!
Every year, all we hear about up here is how bad the Buffalo schools are. Low graduation rates, low attendance, low test scores, yada, yada, yada. And every year we also hear that some Laotian kid who came to the U.S. when he was seven is the valedictorian of one of the city schools some eleven years later.
Even in Buffalo's worst schools, there are kids getting an education, graduating, going to college, or going into [wait for it] work!
It is the child's responsibility to get an education. Now, this, in no way, should be taken as an endorsement of our dismal public education system, but blaming the schools for the shortcomings of the students has been turned into just another justification for constantly raising school budgets.
That hasn't worked.
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