Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
It's sink or swim for school kids
By Derrick Z. Jackson, 9/3/2003
WE LOVE TO SAY kids are not stupid. This is a mediocre moment to find out if that is true. American families are in the process of throwing 48 million schoolchildren back into the public schools. That is a lot of fry floating in the pond. The good news is that their chances of growing to maturity are significantly better than those of the fish. For instance, female lobsters produce about 10,000 eggs, out of which less than 1 percent grow to adulthood. A much higher percent of children eventually will graduate from the nation's high schools.
That is small comfort for parents who send their children off to school under clearly decreasing odds of success and a clearly declining return on our investment. We love to say kids are our future. Based on what we are investing in them, we are not expecting much.
Not a day has gone by in the last two weeks without yet another story about school cutbacks and program elimination. In Massachusetts and the rest of the nation, schools in cities and suburbs are slashing funds for music, theater, foreign languages, school newspapers, and field trips. These are the kinds of things that day by day create cultured human beings, not just standardized-test automatons. Extracurricular activities that keep youth off the streets, even sports, have been decimated.
Posted by P6 at September 3, 2003 12:09 PM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1524