Reply to How to fix our crisis

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "How to fix our crisis"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m so confused by the backlash against op. These are just truthful parts of American education and have been for quite some time.[/quote]

Exactly! I suspect the backlash is coming from people invested in the current system. People like Lucy Calkins and her myriad certified instructors (now debunked) or DoE bureaucrats. I cannot understand how anyone would not agree that we need to improve our educational system and have ideas for doing so. [/quote]

Those in the trenches see that we need to improve mastery of basic skills first. Posters are going on about calculus when there are plenty of students who haven't mastered basic math. Everything after that is a waste of time for these students.

If they can't read basic decodable books, no use in assigning them Chaucer. If they can't write a grammatically correct sentence, what good is assigning them essays to write?[/quote]

Second 20:43 again. This thread is fascinating (with the exception of the few name callers). I’d love to do a DCUM meet-up and continue the discussion and perhaps actually do something! (We used to do that when DCUM first started!)

It seems often government, schools, and social services agencies don’t have an easy way to connect the dots. A good example of success is when I volunteered at a DC high school (Eastern). The school was dealing with truancy issues and the teachers and principal eventually realized that many of their students cut classes in order to work to help support their families. They then changed the hours that certain classes were offered to work around the most common work schedules. Obviously, that took a lot of commitment and was just one high school, but it’s a good example of what can be done.

Going back to your example of the night shift parents who don’t get their kids to school…I wonder if some of these families are living in HOC housing or similar and if the truancies could be brought to the attention of the housing officials, maybe they impose a small fine if the schools report that the kids are not attending school. Obviously, you don’t want to end up with them being homeless, but there has to be some type of carrot and stick approach that could tie the issue of truancy back to other government-supported benefits going to these families. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics