Throughout the fiasco at Harding no one has talked about the cause of its closing. It didn't just get bad overnight. Like all failing urban schools, it has been in a long decline, which nobody seemed to notice or care about. It would have gone on like that forever absent state intervention. As Winston Churchill said "Americans always do the right thing, when they have no other choice".
Kids in urban districts start school behind in basic skills. The elementary and middle schools fail to get them caught up and pass them into high school unprepared. So they fail. Upset parents are now trying to turn Harding into a charter school. They didn't seem to be upset when their kids were coming out of Harding undereducated, but are now outraged about long bus rides to the remaining district high schools where the culture is unwelcoming. Other than avoiding busing, what else would turning Harding into a charter accomplish? The kids will still be coming from the same homes and passing through the same elementary and middle schools that couldn't prepare them for high school. A charter school won't do any worse, but the improvement will be limited.
But why pick on Harding? In FWCS Wayne has virtually identical scores on the ECA, about 4 points lower in math and about 4 points higher in English. Considering that Harding has 30% English challenged Burmese you could argue they were actually doing better than Wayne, which also just fired its principal, apparently because he wasn't with the program either. Then there's SSHS which is only a bit better and is now run by the principal who couldn't fix Wayne?
Well, as Henny Youngman's most famous one liner would have put it to Tony Bennett, "Take my high schools .....please!" More likely the he'll dumb down the ECA's.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
The answer is obvious, we need all day kindergarten!
Sorry, just couldn't resist! Ha!
And all day pre-school with "free" breakfast and lunch. The answer is charter schools that get the same results for 70% of the cost. No guidance counselors, no conflict mediators, no teachers' unions, no cops with loaded guns in the high schools. And no Wendy.
I have subbed at both Wayne & Harding before, and their feeder schools. So, I can some adequate insight.
Pros and Cons of EACS
* Village has teachers that work hard to teach, for the most part, however there are a few teachers that should be removed.
* Prince Chapman's teachers NEED to be fired. There are ONE or TWO good teachers, and lots of terrible teachers.
* Harding's teachers, last year (I avoided Harding, due to the horrible mgt. this year) for the most part worked extremely hard. The most teachers, IMHO left for Leo. Let's see if Leo's scores hold up.
* EACS won't address the major issues with the lackluster teachers, parents or students. With that being said, the kids were afraid of Dr. Brown and I rarely had too many problems. However, the new principal believed teachers should be friends with his students. I believe that he was the bad apple of the resume pile, so he got picked. He lacked discipline mgt. skills!
* My thought is EACS is not addressing real issues by moving kids.
Pros and Cons of Fort Wayne
* One good teacher in K-12th, a few mediocre and tons of very poor teachers.
* Lack of discipline! Major lack of.....across the board.
* Tons of diversity! Loved that I had 20 kids from 20 different
countries.
* The best teachers left for Northwest Allen County schools in a matter of a couple or years, or left teaching altogether.
* Discipline has not been a new thing. I knew a local college student, in 1998, who decided not to teach after the disrespect, they saw at South Wayne.
I have no experience in EACS but I don't doubt that like FWCS they are not addressing the real issues. The attempt to turn Harding into a charter after decades of failure illustrates the indifference of the district and the community until it's too late. And the parents who believe that Harding can be fixed without tackling the feeder schools are delusional. Without doing that, the district won't help the kids who'll be bused to the other high schools. But that reality may escape detection.
Post a Comment