Monday, March 23, 2009

Public Education: Code Blue

Last Friday morning Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert shared a horrifying statistical profile about our public schools and male students.

Consider 100 boys in public schools. . .
  • 32 will end up in prison. . .
  • 44 will graduate. . .
  • Of those who graduate, only 4 will read at grade 12 levels and only 1 will be able to do grade level mathematics.

The Mayor called us to enter the battle, to come alongside our children and their teachers in a community-wide, grassroots effort to help our children perform at higher levels.

Much more about which to talk in days ahead. For now, is is clear that our community building efforts and all of our gains will be lost until we reform our public schools.

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMonday, March 23, 2009 at 7:59:00 PM CDT

    Janet Morrison's Community Dialogue Blog is always quite good, but today's post in particular sheds light on an education issue I'd been trying to get a better handle on: paying students for grades. Janet's reasoning helped clarify my thinking about it:

    http://janetmorrison.blogspot.com/2009/03/paying-poor-kids-to-improve.html

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  2. AnonymousThursday, April 2, 2009 at 3:58:00 PM CDT

    "...a community-wide, grassroots effort..."

    So what does this mean? Does the effort include analysis? If an analysis is conducted, can it be possible, and realistic, to assume that every possible cause-effect arrangement will be dutifully considered? If so, can we start with the possibility that our public schools are not designed to develop learning skills, but are instead designed to support a political power structure?

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