> From my experience working with educational institutions in California
for
> the past 12 years I've come to understand that the concept of a "failing
> institution" like the concept of a failing student, means different
things
> to different constituencies. I haven't read the research on retention
> outcomes but I'm wondering how it addresses the issue of graduating high
> school seniors read at the eighth grade level? It would seem that a lot
of
> the pressure to "hold back" comes from the political focus on "failing
> schools" where the failing schools are precisely those that promote
> students who haven't received passing grades in the prior level.
This may be shooting myself in the foot, but an eighth grade reading level
doesn't seem so bad to me. In looking at some of those tests I 'll speak
for myself, I don't think I'd do that hot. I make my way through Vygotsky,
Marx, and the post modern literature, but if I was being tested on it I
don't think I'd be in the 95 percentile.
What I find ironic with the social promotion stuff is a vast majority in
New York vollunterred for the program. I know I'd put my kids in summer
school but it isn't offered, so I do it myself. I suspect if programs were
offered many parents would take it up, yet summer programs only seem to get
funding in the context of some kind of punishment. For me this brings up
that prison vs education mentality. If we have summer school in the
context of education it becomes some liberal new deal program, yet if we
can somehow reason summer school as a correctional program it gets funding.
How many kids qualify and need support survices at school, funding is
continually being requested and denied ,but that would be another leftist
social program, but then if we re-think it as some form of punishment it
gets "funding", or mandated or linked to current funding would be more
accurate.
It frustrates me, schools are underfunded, and we know which schools those
are, but in order for them to get funded the schools and the students are
treated as some sort of correctional insitution. A recent article mentioned
most taxpayers were willing to pay $200-500 extra in taxes to get better
funding of schools, but that of course come with many strings. But then as
our Govenor continues to remind us, "the one with the gold gets to rule".
Nate