Monday, April 25, 2005
William Raspberry On Teaching Inner City Youth
The Washington Post columnist comments today on a story by the New York Times that says that despite all the changes New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made to improve education in his city, results are poor. And while I tried not to say anything about his article I could not help it after I read the following:
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For in the end "we" -- if that means school systems and school professionals -- don't know enough because "we" can't know enough to change the culture in which hard-to-educate children are the majority.Oh yes, Mr. Raspberry we certainly do know enough. Here is what we have learned. We need to have a longer class day than traditional schools. We need to have Saturday classes. We need the kids to go to school in the Summer. We need strict discipline. We need high academic standards. We need to believe that every kid can learn. We need to stay late in the day for tutoring. We need to provide social support services. We need to feed our students breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner. We have to end social promotion. We need to teach art in addition to traditional subjects. But most of all; we need parents to be able to choose the school their child attends so that we can inject competition into the public schools system.
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