The Times Union asked the Duval County school board, do they get it? The answer to everybody by now should be a painfully obvious no? Its 2011 friends and the problems we are experiencing as a district with reading, intervening schools and so many other things did not magically appear over night; they have been here for decades. Though to solve these problems perhaps the district only needs to answer one question.
The question the Times Union and the city should be asking is how did all these children get to high school without the ability to read and in many cases do math at the appropriate level? Want to figure out why so many kids are doing poorly, well figure out how and why so many kids were passed onto high school without the skills they need to be successful. Answer this question and we might be able to figure out what to next. I can tell you what the answer will not be and that is they suddenly forgot everything they learned.
Friends as long as we continue to shrug our shoulders or turn a blind eye to why this is happening, as long as we don’t figure out why kids show up to high school unprepared and change it, we will continue to find ourselves in the same failing position, regardless of whatever fly by night fix, and make no mistake, splitting the failing schools into two theme schools each is as fly by night as you can get, the school board comes up with.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Yeah, we middle school teachers know what we are sending you, but the pressure to pass kids and get them out of 8th grade regardless of their preparation for high school is crushing. A Martian could spot the problem in a second: how can all these A and B middle schools feed into D and F high schools?
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with Anonymous there. If middle schools are really doing the job they are supposed to do and high schools keep coming up short year after year, are we really asking the right things of middle school students? I am not suggesting that middle schools do the job of the high schools. That's not my point. Maybe it's time to pause and reflect on the idea that the attention to the fcat and the narrow curriculum it promotes hinders students at the end of the k12 education. Maybe it's time to get invested early and stop running story after story about "failing" high schools and figure out what the data really says about elementary and middle schools. should a middle school really get an "A" for having 50% of its kids read at grade level because it's an improvement over the 40% it had last year? instead we'll blame the high school teachers and tell everyone that more "rigor" is needed and how "back in my day" every school was churning out rocket scientists like they were going out of style.
ReplyDeleteSomeone has to be on the bottom. That is the ugly truth that makes our society possible. There is no money in the cure, but billions, if not trillions in "treating" the disease.
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