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Pitiful - Nearly Half of Louisiana Public Schools Failing

19
Scottish Dragon10/05/2011 4:12:18 pm PDT

The “wrecking ball” is a fallacy. Top-down approaches that fire the administrators, dump the teachers and institute yet more and more unproven methods to train children to take standardized tests are going to be the death of education in this country.

Schools used to be an extension of the community. In mnay cases, that is over.

If you want schools to work, the community has to be invested in the school and participate in it. Many African Americans insist they had a better education under segregation then what their kids got when schools desegregated. Wanna know why?

Black schools acted holistically with the churches, parents and community leaders. Teachers acted with authority and reinforced community values in addition to teaching academics. That ended when desegregation finally went through here in NC in 1971. Black administrators and teachers were all fired. All of them (it took a generation for black teachers and administrators to start showing back up in Southern schools). Black students went to classes under white administrators who did not care about them, and half of the white classmates fled to “segregation acadamies”, which were private all-white schools. The link of school to community was broken, and it has never really recovered. It didn’t have to happen that way, but it did.

By the by, I am taking an upper division class on public schools and public policy this semester. I learned real quick that “failing” scores reported by states are cooked just as much for political reasons as “passing” scores are. It all depends on whether the governor and legislature want to hide something… or want to break the public schools so their cronies can get public money in the charter schools.