Miguel Roig wrote:
We've had threads before about 'students getting worse' and those discussion have sometimes led me to question the accuracy of faculty impressions of the academic readiness of students. However, annual 'report cards' of our nation's schools have not been favorable for years and verify our perceptions. In fact, a just-published report by the Manhattan Institute (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/ewp_03.pdf) paints a pretty grim picture of public high school education. For example, consider the following statistic revealed by the Manhattan report: "Only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges." I don't know what the exact figures are, but I imagine that the 32% probably translates to hundreds of thousands of students. One also wonders how much better some private high schools really are.
Miguel raises some interesting and important points in his email (some of which I've snipped). I find the 70% statistic particularly interesting.
This year in St. Louis there was a controversy concerning the newly elected school board and the work they were doing. Some folks threatened to keep their children out of school for the first day. [As an aside, I personally applaud citizen involvement and community action but keeping children out of school seems to me to send the wrong message to kids.] Anyway, a major media campaign was enacted to increase student attendance and included major sports figures, religious leaders, etc. As a result, the following news headline appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "In the End, Kids came to learn; First-Day Attendance is Up Despite Push to Boycott Schools." Indeed school attendance was up! The downside is that approximately one out of four children did not attend school. Attendance for the first day was 76% up from 74% the previous year. In a school district with almost 40,000 children and adolescents, that translates into just under 10,000 children not in school. How can we expect kids to do well and graduate if they rarely make it into the building?
The bottom line is that the problems experienced in education reflect broader systemic issues ranging from those within the classroom to broader societal concerns.
Best,
Linda
-- Linda M. Woolf, Ph.D. Book Review Editor, H-Genocide Secretary, Society for the Teaching of Psychology Professor of Psychology Coordinator - Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Webster University 470 East Lockwood St. Louis, MO 63119
Main Webpage: http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's (and woman's) best friend. . . . Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
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