Reply to S/0 if you could improve low school performance, what would you do?

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Reply to "S/0 if you could improve low school performance, what would you do?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Now is not the time for semantics.  
Stop making excuses - - they can't read, write, or speak in English well. What they do know is from TV, thus they perform poorly on all the tests. 
They are way below others and their peers. In fact, they cannot read, write or speak in any language well.  
We are shoveling monetary and tangible resources at them for the last 10 years, we cannot keep up, it is overwhelming the system and no end is in sight.  The new reputation of MoCo and MCPS is "focus on ELS students."  It is the magnet district for the hemisphere.  Bienvenidos. [/quote]

It has very little to do with language.   In most cases, these kids are reading and writing, quite frankly, at the same level as other kids of their same SES.   I.E. they are from poor families, and like MANY (not all) kids from poor families, they don't have great academic background knowledge or high literacy skills.

I don't know how much money your school district is spending on teachers and resources for ESL students, because I live and work in a different county.   But even if you fired all the ESL teachers and stopped the program completely, you would still have kids who were not reading and writing on grade level, although their oral fluency was fine.     What do you want to do with all these kids (a ground which frankly, includes many poor children including African American ones, and other poor minorities, as well as the occasional poor white child in MoCo)?

You can't just dismiss them from school -- seriously, that's not allowed by federal law.   If your county provides a free public education to residents, you aren't legally allowed to just exclude a bunch of kids because they have poor background knowledge and low literacy scores in preK.   Putting them all into a special school to learn English won't actually help the problem, because they already speak English.... especially the African American ones, who really don't speak Spanish, you know?

So you are going to have to provide SOME remediation and special programs to bring them up to speed.   If you don't, your scores in Montgomery County are going to continue to go down, down, down, and your property values will be dragged down with them.
[/quote]

Remediate them at one location. don't mix these kids with the kids that are higher performers if they can't keep up. no one wins.[/quote]

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