This letter is something else.
So at the start of this summer’s program, this teacher was supposed to have 11 students in his class. But on the first day only two students showed up and on day two he was down to one student. By week’s end, a few parents had withdrawn their kids but most simply did nothing.The teacher found there were five kids on a wait list whose parents wanted to see them get extra help but when he asked about getting them in to fill the empty seats. He was immediately shot down because the district will not drop any student from a class even if they never show up. They won’t even contact the parent to ask if they plan to send their child because this is part of their “racial justice overhaul.”Now, when I say the district is “not allowed” to do so, I don’t mean they’re forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year. The administrator I spoke to seemed baffled that I would even ask. “I’ll let you know if any parents pull their kids out,” he told me, “but otherwise, your class is technically full.”,,,
I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state....
He concludes that the left has accidentally stumbled into a set of beliefs so crazy that to describe them accurately sounds like something made up, only they aren’t made up.
6 comments:
It is the only strategy left until we can engineer the genetics, and I have been waiting for it to become common.
@AVI: You might find this article interesting, or at least gratifying.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
School can matter--it can be downright bad, with disruption and violence making it hard to learn.
Well, the headline is stronger than it should be. Education doesn't work, they claim, at raising someone out of their natural place regarding intelligence. It does work at conveying a lot of information and skill, but they 'get' as much of it as they were capable of getting when they got here. It doesn't make you better at that.
Education may be good at the non-education parts, of learning social lessons. Which worries me, given the change in social lessons. I love Freddie deBoer, BTW.
The Freddie deBoer essay was new to me. Reading it, I quite largely agree. Except for one paragraph. Teacher quality, and school quality, exist. Or if they do NOT, then we disagree on the meaning of the term "quality". Perhaps a teacher or school can very effectively raise most students' ability and awareness of "racial equity" while leaving them functionally illiterate. And perhaps a school wide selection bias for teachers who prioritize such teaching is not a matter of "quality". But quite clearly there are classrooms and schools that do start with phonics and end with readers -- and those who start with mushy methods and end up with crippled, unemployable, adults.
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