Cynthia Brickey, a teacher at Clovis West High School, wrote a very provocative Valley Voices essay a couple of weeks ago and her e-mail box has not recovered since. She said dozens of people have written her -- just one in disagreement -- that students who are not doing their schoolwork should be booted out of college prep classes and into vocational education.
What do you think? Here is an excerpt from her column:
Education has spent the past 20 years trying to get every kid to go to college. A lot of kids go for six weeks. After the first midterm, they drop out. It's too much like work. They never belonged there in the first place. Example: Many junior colleges now have two levels of English labs the student must take and pass before the student is eligible for English 1A.Work. That's where I believe these oxygen-deprivation machines belong, at work. The ODMs (not my expression, my science colleague's) belong at work. We finally got a grant at Clovis West High School to improve our auto shop -- fantastic! What about all the other non-college professions? Machinists, construction, heating and air-conditioning, plumbing, cement design, interior/exterior painting, esthetics, culinary, health care. The list is endless.
Why aren't we preparing these dropouts for work and not welfare? In some inner cities like Baltimore, the high school graduation rate is 30%. That's deplorable.
What do the taxpayers want us to do? I believe they have the answer, not us.
Many of the answers lie in the home, not the school. The answer lies in parenting, not teaching. The answer lies in the implosion of the American family and absent parents, not in incompetent teachers. The answer is personal responsibility, not government responsibility.
I want to hear from you, I really do.
If they can't handle AP classes they should be put back into a regular level class. It is just too much the norm to let them slide through.
That is the problem with the school system today. When people started new math, ingenius though it may have been. They left entire groups behind who could not comprehend it. Those people became parents and voila you have Desk Warmers by the thousands. I have always been of the mindset, if you can't make them all brain surgeons you need to canvas the available jobs in the community and focus on those educational needs.
When their parents were rushed through the system and not held accountable for possessing the minimum qualifications this is the end result. Parents now cannot teach their kids simple math and other studies because they themselves were never required to do so. They were just shoved through a broken system. You teach via a broken system you get untrained, unskilled, unable to learn students to try and mold into accountants, doctors and scientists. In otherwords MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.
You add the frustration of the Teacher, Instructor, or Professor into the recipe and you have failure. The professionals are failing the parents because the parents have failed the professionals, it all starts with Johnny/Gil at the breakfast table every morning and ends when they are tucked into their beds at night. You are right the system is entirely broken down at home, now they run with their gangs and mom and dad don't know where they are 90% of the time.
But they have to go to school or mom or dad go to jail. Hence the problem.