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By It is very disquieting to
read statistics on the under preparedness of minority students for
college and the workforce. Public school administrations and teachers
efforts appear to be disingenuous when looking at their students as a
product that a knowledge industry is offering as competitive in today’s
global marketplace where academic excellence is now a necessary
condition for national economic security. If we assume that You may want to take me to task for my harsh assessment; however, I ask you to ponder the comments in an April 19, 2005 Issue Brief by the National Governor’s Association by Kristin D. Conklin. “. . . Nationwide, just one in five black and Hispanic ninth-grade students completes high school four years later with the academic qualifications for admission at a four-year college. Underprepared college students are more likely to take remedial classes, which drives up costs for students, institutions, and states.” This statement suggests that the today’s high school diploma might be considered a certificate of attendance for many minority students. Should the under-prepared eighty percent of minority high school graduates one day desire to go to college then some students may find that yesterday’s high school special education courses morphed into today’s remedial college courses. Conklin quantifies the level of today’s educational crisis. “Approximately 40 percent of students in four-year institutions take at least one remedial math or reading course; 63 percent of community college students enroll in a remedial class. States spend, on average $100,000 for every student’s education. However, 32 out of every 100 young people fail to complete the most basic educational credential the high school diploma, and only 18 out of every 100 students graduate from college on time.” Clearly public four-year colleges pretending they can abandon developing programs to handle the poor quality student coming from the public school systems don’t deserve public funds for their continued existence. When you think about it over 6 out of every 10 students going to community colleges need remedial classes, this suggests that the nation is getting a very bad return on its education dollars. Imagine how many businesses can afford to throw away 32 out of 100 of its products and thrive. What is further discomforting is that we are paying $100,000 on average for each student. If we continue to use the business model, the rules say when a product becomes overpriced in the marketplace it is usually displaced by superior products. The numbers above are making a very strong case for the incarnation of the controversial school voucher that would bring competition for the nation’s education dollars from sectarian and nonsectarian private schools.
I was take aback reading a June 26, 2006 article,
Push grows for higher graduation
standards, in the News Journal newspaper in
“The changes, which would take effect with the graduating class
of 2011, would increase the number of required credits from 22 to 24.
Currently, only four states require 24 credits to graduate.” Initially
you may feel good at the committee’s tough recommendation, then you
start asking yourself is this a groupthink charade or a real paradigm
shift in giving our students a high caliber education. As a person who
specializes in developing teaching techniques to teach remedial
mathematics courses at the college level, especially to students coming
from inner city backgrounds, I think the My experience suggests that the real problem exists at the middle school level because I find many students in the remedial mathematics classes do not know multiplication, division, fractions, percentages, and the times tables nor how to read their mathematics textbook. Many students are enchanted with failure or their goal may be to merely get by with a “D” which may be insufficient academic background to pass the next level course. Some students come with a gang-banger attitude that they may have exploited to intimidate high school teachers that might have encouraged some teachers to exploit social promotion or sending discipline problem students to special education to get these hellions out of their class. Finally, many students lack academic tenacity, so they will readily drop courses making traditional college graduation dates evolve into a pipe dream. My role becomes to help remedial students undergo a mainstream acculturation where I give the students self confidence and the mathematics is merely the tool I used to accomplish this task. We establish that I grew up my early years between two public housing projects and I fellowshipped with project friends during my teenage years; therefore, I am a no nonsense teacher. There will be no cell phones, men take of their head rags and hats in class, everyone has to go the blackboard every class to do assignments and missing blackboard assignments lowers your grade, excuses are no substitute for not getting assignments done, students going to sleep in class must leave for the day, assignments done at the blackboard must be at a high caliber or the students has to erase them and start over, and students working at the blackboard can not sit down until they understand the concept under discussion. My average students’ dropout-rates for all of the courses I have taught through four colleges are guesstimated at fewer than 10 percent. My approach is to focus on students understanding the material. I discourage rote memorization. I tell my students, “If you learn to read your textbook it is your friend. If you do not learn to read the textbook, it is your enemy.” However, I believe the greatest impact comes when the students accept my proclamation, “I am not here to fail you. I am here to teach you. You got to work hard to pass and you have to work hard to fail. However, some people work hard enough to fail.” Students appear to understand that this proclamation means that I truly care for their wellbeing, so I create an emotional link with my students that allow me to chastise bad behavior and demand excellence without getting adverse reactions. My style is to give tough tests that require some thinking. I abhor just giving students skill and drill type problems that one might get out of some book of problems. I tell my students that chances are your industrial management is not going to ask you to just solve a quadratic equation they are looking for you to interpret your findings.
The late Dr. Edward H. Kerner would focus on understanding when I
was a graduate student in physics at the
I hope that other states
do not follow |
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