Yesterday, the Red Sox lost a key game against the New York Yankees, and in spite of many hours of preparation, we registered ZERO kids for the Tech Workshop at the annual Harvest Festival.
The latter tells me that we haven’t yet discovered a way to find “our” kids, something we as a group are planning to discuss tomorrow afternoon.
I still believe in what we are trying to do with the Workshop, and fortuntely, a number of people, including at least one local foundation, have told me it is also important to them: providing enrichment opportunities that aren’t currently available anywhere else.
As you’ve probably seen on Peter’s blog, his family is in the middle of a major imbroglio with the local public schools, just one more in a long series.
I’ve had issues with the public schools for about 50 years now, so this is an old, sad story for our family, both extended and immediate.
What IS new, to me at least, is that I’ve been hearing almost the identical stories recently from the other side of the desk.
It all comes down to the same thing: bright people being penalized, even unto banishment and economic capital punishment, because “the system” can’t deal with intellect and creativity, whether those are found in kids or in teachers.
I’ve heard the rationales for years, and I don’t “buy” them: too many kids, too many agendas, “it’s the parents’ fault”, etc.
If public school systems and voters put as many resources into academics as they do, for example, into athletics for a chosen few, we wouldn’t have nearly the problems we have now, ranging from misbehaving kids to demoralized teachers to this country’s overall loss of competitiveness in new technology development.
Exhibit 1: my friend the teacher has actual face time of only 4.5 hours a day. How is the rest of her time being used – in staff meetings? Putting together lesson plans whose sole purpose is to stuff some bureaucrat’s filing cabinet?
Exhibit 2: a tutor can cover an entire day of academics in 2 hours. That means that the other 5 or 6 hours of the school day is basically fluff. Take out lunch and recess, and that still leaves a good 4 hours – for what?
Compare this to athletic programs: the most talented are identified early, and given lavish individual attention, including specialized equipment, trained coaches, and even medical care when needed.
Jocks go through the schools in a cohort. They have enormous prestige. They are nurtured as a group and taught how to function as a group. Their individual abilities are developed, and both they and their coaches spend time on overcoming or minimizing their weaknesses. They have the full and unconditional support of school administrators and the community as a whole.
Now, imagine that same model being used for academically talented kids, and you get my point.
In this weekend’s local paper, there’s a story that Barnstable County was given an award as one of the the US’s “100 Best Communities for Young People”.
The criteria include supposed improvements in teen pregnancy, availability of health insurance and tobacco use.
You’ll notice that academic excellence is missing from that list.
In fact, earlier in the week, September 28 to be exact, it was reported in the Cape Cod Times that “Seven out of 11 school districts on the Cape failed to meet the improvement goals set by No Child Left Behind in one or more subgroups, according to results released yesterday by the state Department of Education.”
My town, Mashpee, is among the group that has failed to make progress for special-needs students. This means that Mashpee is required to write an improvement plan, which includes offering to send students to a different school in their district.
Problem is, for most middle and high school students on the Cape, there ARE no alternatives within the district.
This means that special needs kids might have to be sent to schools off-Cape, all well and good except for the fact that by Grade 5, 6 or 7, this means disrupting the much-vaunted “social relationships” that are part of the public (versus home or independent) school reason for being.
In other words, public schools exist in large part to teach kids “how to get along”, and their solution for a kid who isn’t part of the mainstream is to separate them from the relationships they’ve developed over most of their young lifetimes.
Even to a layperson like myself, it’s obvious that something is very, very wrong with all of this.
Through the years, I’ve heard everything blamed from teachers’ unions and the tenure system to video games to Mercury poisoning in vaccines. I’ve seen the rise and fall of every kind of “solution” from “New Math” to “No Child Left Behind” to MCAS testing to providing stripped-down laptops to every child in the public school sector.
It’s like watching people pour millions of dollars and person-hours into trying to build a high-performance race car powered by a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine: the fundamentals just don’t make any sense, and the end results will only break your heart.