In the last eight years the amount of students attending Raines high school has gone from over 1700 to under a thousand and they aren’t the only school that has experienced this exodus. Dozens of schools have seen their enrollments drop as thousands of kids have left the North and West sides of town.
One of the reasons is Duval County lacks cogent ideas to help these children. Instead the district approves charter schools like the KIPP School, which had the worse FCAT scores in northeast Florida and staff the schools with KIPP teachers and overwhelms those veterans who haven’t left.
Now they do have ideas like the Read it Forward program and training content areas in CAR-PD a wonderful reading program but then they poorly execute them. They put to many poor readers in a summer reading class turning it into babysitting and instead of taking things off of teacher’s plates so they can take the CAR-PD class, which is a lot of work, they make it optional.
Now the district has tried to put veteran teachers in the schools. They throw a few dollars at the problem by trying to bribe them to go to them, something few do. Why would a teacher want to go to a school where the work load was increased exponentially and in some cases the support was nonexistent?
Where are the ideas like bringing in rookie and new teachers before the school year begins and giving them additional training? Where are the social workers and mental health counselors in each school because why kids act up or do poorly in schools has nothing to do with schools. Where is the support for teachers by reducing the amount of paper work they do much of which has little to do with teaching? Where is the support for teachers allowing them to write up unruly children and allowing them to fail kids who make no effort? Where are the adjustments to the schedule that make school more manageable and enjoyable to kids, we can’t overwhelm kids and make school drudgery and then shake our heads and wonder why they do poorly. Where is the legitimate summer school that gives kids more time to learn the material and less time to forget what they learned?
Instead of working to improve our struggling schools, to help our minority children all the state and district do is put more obstacles in their way. Do you know what the difference in curriculum is between the most motivated student at Stanton and a marginally interested student, who lives with his grandmother, who wants to drive a truck that goes to Ribault? The answer there is none. Well, make that the student at Stanton is getting the education he wants to get while the one at Ribault is forced to muddle through school taking classes that he isn’t interested in, in a one-size-fits-all system.
The state and district ignore poverty saying it is an excuse, well look where all the schools that have been taken over, or are in danger of being taken over reside. Friends there aren’t any suburb schools in danger of being taken over. No they are all located in the depressed North and West sides of town. Poverty, by the way, is the number one quantifiable measurement in education; those students that live in it as a group does worse than those that don’t. But that’s not to say we should just throw our hands up and quit and dismantle the schools and ship the students out, something the state and district seem to want. The state, so its friends can make money off the privatization movement, and the district because they don’t have a clue as to what to do.
There are common sense solutions that don’t break the bank or reinvent the wheel, and don’t wreck neighborhoods in the process. We should have discipline and rigorous classes. We do students no favors when we pass them along without discipline, or a work ethic, or the basic knowledge that they need. If we provided legitimate after school and summer school opportunities we could catch the kids up to where they should be. We could make the schedules more manageable, meaningful and enjoyable for kids.
Often kids take seven or eight classes and that is to many, they don't have any electives they choose and that makes school drudgery and are taking classes that have nothing to do with what they want to do, which throws meaningful out with the bath water.
Solutions to our problems are within our grasp friends and we can grab them and make changes that benefit our children or we can ignore them and continue to do what hasn’t worked and our children will continue to pay the price for it.
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