American-Ideal.com

Anybody with children has heard of the No Child Left Behind Act. This is the Act that frees up school districts and teachers to do what it takes to educate our youth. I like most of the act. It makes sense to set objectives and not procedures, and even though the testing part is controversial, in real life we test our performance against objectives everyday. Your annual review at work is nothing more than reviewing your test. Though I like the Act, it has one overriding failed assumption; that assumption is that all schools are Suburban School Want-To-Be’s. Since suburban schools are successful, the obvious assumption is that failing schools are just not wisely using their resources to measure up.

The reality is that wealthy districts have good schools and poor districts, for the most part, have poorly performing schools. There are very different challenges facing poor and working class school districts compared to suburban life. Suburban schools find a stay-at-home parent in the family, bedrooms are filled with books, kids are signed up for every extra curricular activity imaginable, English is the first language, and life at home is safe.

In the poor district, both parents work, there are more single parent households, parent’s can’t afford many extras at school, for many kids English is a second language, and the play ground of the street is shared with drug dealers, pimps, and anemic economic life. One child get told day in and day out what is possible; the other gets told by the emptiness of their world that there is no future.

Believing that some schools are bad while other schools are good oversimplifies the problems in our schools. The problem lies in our unwillingness to address the forces facing each child in a poor district. We need a massive influx of teaching talent onto struggling schools to support the children where their parents either can’t or won’t help in their child’s education. Our teaching talent has to overcome the influence of the street, and the demoralizing absence of opportunity in poor communities.

To get the teaching skills we need in poor districts we need to offer high pay commensurate with high standards and expectations. We are reaching for teachers with extraordinary talent and asking them to go into very difficult circumstances in our poor school districts. We won’t get the talent unless we are serious about the pay.

We need national standards for teacher and student performance. Our standards must be based on exceeding the global standards that many children around the world enjoy. Our policy should be directed toward liberating teachers to decide how to best teach and eliminate standardized techniques. A teacher’s job is to teach.

We need to look beyond our K-12 grades. The number of well paying jobs for high school graduates will decline over the next decade. The world recognizes the value of a college education. We need an equal emphasis on higher education for all Americans. We should expand financial aid through low cost loans, grants, and scholarships. If we build an interest in going to college in our youth, if we make the idea of going to college a realistic goal attainable goal for anybody, if we make college financially palatable, we will be building Americans that are ready and able to compete on the world stage.

Copyright: American-Ideal.com 2007