Not all students who don't graduate are "drop outs." I think we need a new term. Many are "shut outs," shut out of a public education system designed for them to fail. Underfunded California schools, made further impotent by the No Child Left Behind Act (Every Child Left Behind), cannot meet the needs of students of different skill levels, learning styles, and god forbid we should adequately help students with different primary languages! I watch students act out in class, not because they are trouble makers or failures, but because with rigidly defined curricula and overcrowded classes, the schools are failing to adjust to meet their needs. They act out in class, get in trouble, and have the idea that they are bad kids hammered into them. Hear it enough and eventually they believe it and once shut out of an education they turn to other means to survive. Before to long they find themselves riding the school-to-prison pipeline straight in to juvenile jail or adult prison. Our system is the failure, not them.
Education is a vital investment in a democracy. California's divestment from education over the past 30 years is a divestment from a democratic state.
Then again, history tells us the promise of democracy was a joke to begin with. Well, those of us who learned history from somewhere other than the white-washed, manifest destiny, fast food nation, critical-thinking-aversion version taught in high schools know U.S. democracy is a joke anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment