The Los Angeles School System
From the Mayor on down (politician that he is), everyone is bitching about the school board that runs the LA schools. We've all read the newspaper reports. Kids are failing state 12th grade tests and not graduating...when the tests are pegged at 10th grade learning and below! Discipline is horrible. Teachers have lost the will to teach. Parents and kids are fleeing to private schools and magnet schools (where the administation is beyond the everyday tentacle of the school board). The Mayor wants to take over!
A thought passed my mind; stimulated by the percentage of Asian students admitted to UCLA for the school year 2006-2007: over 25%! I know how to solve the problem of the LA public school system: allow only Asian kids in it: you think it much be a better school system?
Perhaps, one of the reasons perhaps that the La school board is having such a difficult time with achievement, standards and discipline is that they are having to succeed in the face of a nasty social tide which is not their fundamental educational charter to handle. They are having to teach mostly African-American students who have inherited two centuries of neglect by the dominant white culture, a black culture that is accused of not overly inculcating or emphasing education in the home (think a legacy of slavery had something to do with that?), and a Hispanic population somewhat overwhelmed by immegrant and illegal immagrant kids for whom English is a second language.
Come on...give the school board a break. Give them mostly Asian students (and their deeply embedded historical culture of hard work, discipline and achievement) and you'll see test scores rocketing, discipline a breeze, and teachers eager and willing to go to school and TEACH...not merely trying to hold the line against a flood of social problems that they should not have been theirs to handle in the first place. Rather than spend time, energy and money politicizng the problem, LA--and the US--should focus on a Marshall Plan of recovery--one that should have been implemented after Brown vs. Board of Education in the 1950's--to enable the Afro-American community to catch up educationally from the legacy of their historial injstice, and accepting the reality that along with cheap labor prices for nanny, garderers and construction people, comes the additonal cost of culturally--and that includes education--smoothing the illegals/undocumenteds entrance into the mainstream society. Cheap is rarely free.
A thought passed my mind; stimulated by the percentage of Asian students admitted to UCLA for the school year 2006-2007: over 25%! I know how to solve the problem of the LA public school system: allow only Asian kids in it: you think it much be a better school system?
Perhaps, one of the reasons perhaps that the La school board is having such a difficult time with achievement, standards and discipline is that they are having to succeed in the face of a nasty social tide which is not their fundamental educational charter to handle. They are having to teach mostly African-American students who have inherited two centuries of neglect by the dominant white culture, a black culture that is accused of not overly inculcating or emphasing education in the home (think a legacy of slavery had something to do with that?), and a Hispanic population somewhat overwhelmed by immegrant and illegal immagrant kids for whom English is a second language.
Come on...give the school board a break. Give them mostly Asian students (and their deeply embedded historical culture of hard work, discipline and achievement) and you'll see test scores rocketing, discipline a breeze, and teachers eager and willing to go to school and TEACH...not merely trying to hold the line against a flood of social problems that they should not have been theirs to handle in the first place. Rather than spend time, energy and money politicizng the problem, LA--and the US--should focus on a Marshall Plan of recovery--one that should have been implemented after Brown vs. Board of Education in the 1950's--to enable the Afro-American community to catch up educationally from the legacy of their historial injstice, and accepting the reality that along with cheap labor prices for nanny, garderers and construction people, comes the additonal cost of culturally--and that includes education--smoothing the illegals/undocumenteds entrance into the mainstream society. Cheap is rarely free.
posted by Cliff Osmond at 10:10 PM
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