There is a truly alarming report out of Paterson, New Jersey that captures how far our educational system has declined. Only 19 kids in this large school district have SAT score that are considered appropriate for college. That means that less than a dozen score at least 1500 out of 2400 on the standardized test. This year, the average score was just 1,200. While meetings are held at the White House and across the country on Ferguson, I continue to believe that the greatest reform to benefit all races would be a greater commitment to our public schools. Too many families are trapped in a cycle of poverty with no real opportunities while our workforce becomes less and less competitive in the new economy.
The Patterson School District has 29,400 students in preschool to grade 12. On the high school level, only 19 of the 600 students reviewed were “college ready” – just three percent.”. That represents a decrease from last year when average score obtained by a student in the area was just 1,200. It is a decrease from the 26 (4.2 per cent) last year.
For kids in Patterson, the future seems quite bleak as they enter a workforce that is demanding more skilled laborers and greater levels of education. When you add an equally alarming wealth gap that is expanding in our society (here and here), it is not a good combination for a country seeking to maintain a high standard of living. As people lament over the death of the American Dream, we should look at our bizarre priorities in sending hundreds of billions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq while our educational system continues to decline. We appear to be working hard to create a low-tech workforce at a time of high-tech enterprises. One only has to look at the graduating class of Paterson, New Jersey to understand the implications of our lack of national focus on education. It is a curious result in a district that boasts as its motto that it is “Preparing All Children For College and Careers.”
The horses have already left the barn.
I live in South Carolina. Terrible schools here. My children at the high school level dropped out of the local high school and went online. My daughter finished up a year early and went right in to college. My son is on track to do the same thing. There are options but if the parents don’t give a hoot what can be done?????
Rio – a few studies have shown that the interest of the mother in education dictates how well her children will do.
Until schools get treated like a business and students as their product, they will fail. Stop paying a gym teacher the same as a physics teacher and start making schools earn their tax money that they steal from us every year.
In the end I’m hoping that the real paradigm shift happens and schools get removed entirely. Hopefully the internet will be able to teach the future kids so that one great teacher can be teaching thousands and we can get rid of the useless wasteful teaching being used now. If you were the top teacher in your field, would you want to be paid $100K for teaching a 100 students or teach a million students and charge them a $1?
Jim22 – what you are not considering is that the P.E. needs to know as much in his/her field as the physics teacher. Actually, the two best history teachers I had in high school were the head football coach and the band teacher. Knowledge does not mean you can impart it. Teaching is an art form, not a science.
Jim22 – the problem with computerized teaching is that some students like it, but others, like myself cannot abide it. I like to interact with my teachers, I want to be able to ask them questions if I do not understand or amplify information. I want to be able to talk to them after class.
When I was teaching I expected the same from my students.
In the armada of public policy, education is the largest of all ships that need to change course. This will take generations to fix but first, we need to agree on a different heading.
It isn’t about “commitment” to our public schools. It is about CHANGING the way our unionized public schools do not teach and eliminating the indoctrination program that seems to have supplanted actual teaching of concrete subjects.
Money isn’t the answer. Our grandparents and great grandparents got a better education in a one room school with a pot bellied stove by the time they were in 8th grade than our students who graduate college have gotten
It is the curriculum and the discipline that was the norm that made the difference. Teachers who ruled the classroom and students who WANT to learn. Kids who misbehaved were removed from the classroom and sent home to parents who either didn’t care and put them to work or beat the living daylights out of them to make them behave.
Common core is a crime against our children. Just take a look at the so called math program. Even if your child likes math, by the time they get done with him/her she will be unable to add two numbers together.
The teachers don’t teach anything anymore without a political slant. Without stressing feminazi, homosexual promotion, minority, cultural hard-ons given preference over learning the subject. How about just the facts Jack?
American History? World History? Geography? Biology? Chemistry? Math? Geometry? Algebra? English literature? World literature? Composition? A foreign language? That would include English for our millions of illegal alien children. Physical education? Get up an move.
All of these should be CORE courses with no political overtones.
Competent teachers would be nice too, instead of the illiterate boobs we seem to have now taking up our children’s time.
Government schools are not the solution… they are the problem.
“The only change they can make that may have an impact is to quickly remove trouble makers & setup non negotiable standards of behaviors.”
Ha ha. Now that approach is illegal.
“Minneapolis schools to make suspending children of color more difficult
Minneapolis public school officials are making dramatic changes to their discipline practices by requiring the superintendent’s office to review all suspensions of students of color.
The change comes amid intensifying scrutiny of the way Minneapolis public schools treat minority students and in the wake of new data showing black students are 10 times more likely to be sent home than white students.
Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson said she wants to “disrupt that in any way that I can.”
“The only way I can think of doing that is to take those suspensions back to the individuals and try and probe and ask questions,” Johnson said Friday.
The new policy will be implemented as the district approves a settlement with the U.S. Department of Education, which was investigating the district over its inconsistent suspension treatment for black students.“
Pogo – Minneapolis is going to see the return of “Blackboard Jungle.”
It’s not just one cause but many. I agree that it is not going to be solved by one means only and throwing money at it is not a panacea.
Students can overcome great disadvantages if they value education, but too many distractions are instilled in their outlook in life.
The fault is neither schools nor parenting…
I believe low educational outcomes are the fault of bad schools and lousy parenting.
Bad schools as in heavily unionized urban school systems that are bloated with unfireable low performing teachers who are protected by a well organized and strong union. A system that exists not for the benefit of the students, but for the benefit of the union as a way to acquire revenue via mandatory dues and convert that revenue into political influence. In exchange for paying mandatory dues, union educators are promised to never lose their jobs, be largely unaccountable for their performance, and receive excellent benefits.
Bad parenting as in an entire underclass that at best places little value on education, and at worst bullies and assaults the few students who actually want an education.
I had no real understanding of how bad it is until I spent two years in an urban school district as a contracted employee. Gang member parents wanting to beat up other people’s children. Buses being shot at by gang members. Parents boarding buses to beat up children. Parents at school meetings who were so drug addled that they couldn’t remember their own addresses. Parents who tried to beat up administrators because the administrators suspended a violent student. A mom who gave a kindergartner – a kindergartner – a pistol to bring to school in a backpack.
There’s much more. But suffice it to say that an underclass culture that promotes violence, lawlessness, sexualization of children, drug use, and the thug culture, and punishes achievement and hard work is a major contributor to low achievement in urban public high schools.
The fault is neither schools nor parenting. Genetically reproduced learning disorders are today’s biggest challenge. Dyslexia, Asperger-autism spectrum disorders, speech and language limitations, cannot be cured by trying to fill a student with information. DNA manipulation, AI implants, genetic modification will have to happen to bring LD folks up to speed. Meanwhile, teachers need to focus on what a kid CAN do and find ways to convert that into an honorable, non-oppressive contribution to the larger community.
doglover – there is nothing about the disabilities that you mention that have anything to do with the low scores of NJ schools. In this case it is the schools. If you set high standards and expect your students to meet them, they will. When the bar is low, that is all the student knows and that is all they will meet.
Eleazer is basically right. There really is nothing much the schools can do. The only change they can make that may have an impact is to quickly remove trouble makers & setup non negotiable standards of behaviors.
At the end of the day it comes down to family and the child though.
Intact homes are white privilege.
To close the education gap, we need to socialize the broken homes.
Current federal policies favor broken homes.
“The [May 2013 US] census also found that Asian mothers were the least likely to be unmarried, with just 11 percent of new Asian mothers being single. White single mothers also were below the national average, at 29 percent. Among Hispanics, 43 percent of all new mothers were unmarried, as were 68 percent of all African American women who had recently given birth.
Census demographers said that single motherhood, while on a steady uptick since the 1940s, has accelerated in recent years. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980, the report said. But in the previous five years alone, between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.”
Winning!
Where’s Principal Joe Clark, “Crazy Joe” with the baseball bat? Throw in Newark, NJ for good measure!
There is nothing that says the Common Core will improve anything. No Child Left Behind has helped since it has closed some really bad schools.
Barbara – as a former teacher and as someone who had the opportunity to go through all I find the Common Core to be expanded garbage. Education should always be at the state level. It is nice that Bill Gates (a college-drop out who used his daddy’s money to start his company) should be pushing education. And, of course, they teach to the test rather than teach the material and hope it appears on the test.
I have no small amount of experience with public, private, and home schooling and in my view the basic problem is not money, standards and other issues (there are problems there but not the core problem) are families.
In my experience, if there is present both a mother and a father who are committed to their children (not perfect-who is?) meaning they genuinely love them and seek the best, then those children become productive citizens. When there is a parent missing or a poor parent then the success rate of children decline sharply.
Throwing more money will not cure this serious societal problem.
Broken homes are killing our educational system more than anything else.
Reduce the disconnected excessive administration.
Use Japanese, Korean, French, Canadian, etc models as references.
Empower teachers to create courses and take responsibility to control class discipline by deciding if a child must leave.
Design more teacher interaction to create curriculum.
Created education facilities within the system fore problem students.
Design from the bottom up, not the top down.
Pay teachers commensurate with their involvement, not results.
Begin social interaction and discipline training in pre school.
Address students who desire to challenge their selves appropriately.
End mindless jingoisms such as ‘No Child Left Behind’.
Integrate: trades, manufacturing, business acumen, and other real life studies from the 10th grade with corporations tied to the existing tax breaks.
In short, start looking at paradigms abroad and stop spouting this ‘We’re Number One’ bs. In education and health care insurance the US is woefully lacking and the main reason are those that believe that what was designed 230 years ago ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.
Ah, the need for better education discussion, which ALWAYS leads to the we need more money for education discussion. Missing from the article: Paterson, NJ per-pupil spending, 2012-2013 was $20,454.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/14/05/15/per-pupil-school-spending/
Why not just create annuities for these kids, instead of pretending to educate them?
Common core, or at least the testing component, needs to be eliminated. I was just shocked at how little my sixth grader knows about geography, history, and anything else that isn’t directly related to a test that they did or will take soon.
We’re failing our kids in the long run in the hope that the test results show the schools are improving.
And having worked on education reform issues with the Gates Foundation and other local reformers, I can’t agree more. We have to make a greater commitment to improving our public schools for ALL students …if we are ever to get back on track with prosperity and opportunity. This is the “civil rights” issue of our time! The challenge is “urgency.” How do we get our national leaders on board with the “education crisis” we face. In yesterday’s WA Post, longtime education writer Jay Mathews wrote about this question as it relates to the debate about common core — national education standards: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/common-core-might-be-a-hot-topic-on-television-now-but-just-wait/2014/11/29/ee6440c4-74c5-11e4-a755-e32227229e7b_story.html