----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Stenquist"
Subject: Re: Seriously OT - school system shenanigans in Pittsburgh
That's all well in good in theory. But there are times when pragmatic
decisions must be made. I taught ninth grade in a Chicago inner city high
school. If I had taught the curriculum as provided by the board of
education and failed anyone who didn't achieve 70%, NO ONE would have
made it beyond ninth grace, and the school would have become non-
functional. Sometimes you have to deal with the reality of the situation
you're confronted with.
My father taught at Scott Colleigiate here in Regina. For those who get
McLean's magazine, Scott is in the heart of what polite society refers to as
North Central Less polite people have some rather racist labels for it, but
I digress.
The school board fiddled with all sorts of strategies to keep kids in that
school, everything from dropping programs that were considered Euro-Centric,
and therefore culturally assimilative by the largely native community,
putting in what they considered to be culturally friendly programs, dropping
requirements so that students wouldn't have to live woth low marks and high
expectations, putting a funded daycare into the school so that the student
mothers could have their infant children close at hand, the list goes on.
Pragmatic decisions indeed.
At best, Scott has a 10% graduation rate, and this number hasn't changed
significantly for many decades.
I think that the less of a challenge you give, the less able people become
to be challenged.
I also think that it is an insult to any particular group, be they
predomonantly black kids (correct me if I am wrong) in a Chicogo inner city
school or native kids in a Regina inner city school to lower their
educational standards below the median.
Lower standards is telling them at an institutional level that they are less
smart, less intelligent, and less able to cope in society, and then making
truth out of it by graduating them without the skills required to become
contributing members of mainstream society.
We slap them in the face from the time they enter school, and then wonder
why they are bitter young men and women 12 years later.
The end result is high unemployment, more poverty, more crime, and more
hopelessness. If you happen to live in a welfare state, the result is also
higher taxes to support an unemployable group of illiterates, and a lot of
ill will from the taxed group who work very hard to support a
multi-generational life of leisure, as disfunctional parents beget
disfunctional children in this sort of society.
If you apply the same standards to the entire population, those that fail
have at least failed honestly rather than passed dishonestly, and the ones
who pass dishonestly generally end up in the same boat anyway, since they
are not only less prepared for their post educational life, they have gone
through their schooling having it drilled into them that they aren't smart
enough to cope.
Or perhaps it really is OK to graduate kids from grade 12 who can neither
read nor write, and can't identify their own country when handed an atlas.
William Robb
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