Ninth or never
For 40,000 kids in Florida every year, ninth grade is where it all falls apart. No other grade offers such an honest view into what schools are really like, and by extension, so brutally forces us to confront the flip side: How we raise our kids. Yet recent education laws now demand that schools ensure that all students succeed, no matter how warped their brains, no matter how Jerry Springer their homes.
Chapter 1
- Chaos
Ninth grade is where it all falls apart. In Florida, nearly 40,000 ninth-graders are held back each year, enough to fill every school in Sarasota County. - Listen to the story
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
- Synchronicity
For millions of years, our ancestors spent a lot of time with their kids, if only to shield them from hungry predators. For the past few hundred, we haven't. Listen to the story
Chapter4Update
Available to download. Listen to the story segments on your mp3 player. Warning: Profane language
A lot of kids hit the skids in 7th grade as well, particularly in more academically serious school districts that stress abstract and higher order critical thinking. The students with marginal, undiagnosed learning disabilities that they could compensate for easily enough with concrete thinking and unchallenging elementary skill exercises collapse when confronted with algebra, chemistry and analysis level questions.
Then there is the overwhelming social-psychological developmental issues that affect every child in this age cohort ( now imagine you also have ADHD, you read at three grades below your grade level, your Mom is a frenetic, borderline, wack job, Dad is absent or abusive - how much effort is really going to go into mastering the War of 1812 or writing in iambic pentameter? Now let's put this child in a class of 30.)
8th grade also hits girls very hard for entirely nonacademic reasons ( 8th grade is to girls what 9th grade is to boys but, on average, girls are less likely to drop out even when they adopt behaviors that are counterproductive to their educational success and intellectual growth. They squeak by where a boy flunks out or gets kicked out)