Fundamentally I agree with you. Your response reminds me of my friend from work, he is a Vietnamese refugee and we have known each other since undergrad, work, and now we are also going to UCSD together. The guy is freaking AMAZING. He came here with nothing, lived off of welfare for a while too, but immediately rose. The guy worked two shifts a day for two years, saved up all he could than enrolled into college. Throughout college, there were times where his dad, who is in his 60’s, couldn’t work and my friend would have to cover his shifts, eventually having school, tutoring at work, and covering his dads shifts covering almost 20 hours of the day. The guy had only 4 hours of sleep a day for sometimes as long as 6 months, but he still managed to graduate valedictorian.

Even going to UCSD now, he has a family, a 3 year old daughter, and alot of responsibilities at work, yet it is not unusual to find the guy still studying at 4 am, while my lazy ass is sleeping. I call him a machine, he just keeps going and going and going. I don’t think he has gotten anything less than an A+ since he has been here, and this through some of the hardest classes I have ever taken at UCSD.

The reason I bring this up is that you’re right, if somehow the study habits, the love for education, and the yearning to do well was somehow miraculously transplanted into every kid in the ghetto, things would look very different, in fact, that would do more to closing the racial and poverty gap in learning than any solution the infrastructure could address.

So while I agree that the large part of it is the person, is the culture, is the educational priority, that still doesn’t excuse the, albeit smaller, problem of the infrastructure, and having it live up to its highest potential.

Can public schools change? I think they can, but it’s hard to change the standardization of education in public schools. I am a product of a public school from K-9, then a product of magnet school through high school, and private school in college.

I don’t think it’s a university’s (or a public or private school’s) credentials or the amount of “great” teachers, it’s what the student makes of it. I’ve met so many brilliant minds in and outside of school, and very few rarely live up to their potential (I start thinking of oso’s posts a few months back)…but it’s up to them to live up to it and do something.

Have you noticed the increase of small private Catholic high schools for lower-income families? There’s one in Austin near where I used to live called San Jose. It’s purpose is to give lower-income hispanic families a much richer(or an alternative) education from public school. Why? Because it treats it’s students a little more like college kids (they have internships and what not) than a bunch of punks.

Please, please, put the gun down, I promise, I have nothing but good intentions with your sister. Besides, you don’t want to get too pushy, or else we might do what everybody does with an overprotective brother, we might have to go behind your back (email)!!!! LOL J/K

Cold blooded. I’m going to keep an eye on you.

El Nebur

Thanks for stopping by. Please don’t give up on having this discussion with me, trust me, you can change my mind. I don’t care much about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ I care about fixing. I am way more open minded than I think you give me credit for. I see the passion in your writing, and I greatly respect that, I think more people should be passionate about this topic, because it’s a serious topic that needs to be addressed. But after the passion has to come a willingness to hear each other out, to hear different views and different solutions, so please, do discuss this with me.

To narrow down your focus though, I’d really like to know what you think of vouchers. I don’t think these ‘onesy twosy’ solutions will do much of anything without addressing the core of the problem, and vouchers certainly does that. If you disagree with vouchers, please tell me why, because I have a hard time finding the counter arguments acceptable.

And just so you don’t think I am being disingenuous, allow me to offer you a book. I just finished reading, “No Excuses” by the Thermstrom’s. They are both Senior fellows at the Manhatten Institute. Stephan Thernstrom teaches History at Harvard University and Abigail Thernstrom is a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. I tell you this so you don’t think this is just some ‘right-wing’ book out to destroy the education system. This is clearly a book by people who share our passion, and went out of their way to try and address the same problem you and I care soo deeply about. So if you allow me to, I’d like to buy you this book, and all you have to do is tell me what you think about it, nothing more. What do you say?

There are so many issues to tackle in this article you highlighted:
1) Public vs. Private schools – Which is better? Which have more qualified teachers, which one (private) can exclude children for any reason? Which one (public) has to take any student? Vouchers?
2) Class size reduction in elementary school vs. large class size in the Univ. – Is it appropriate? Is it wasting money? Are children able to learn in a large class size? etc.
3) Issues that affect learning and in turn poor test scores: parent lifestyles, language barriers, poverty, lack of food and shelter.
4) Test Scores: Do they really measure student learning? If all states and schools are measured against each other, why isn’t a standard test give? Why do different states interpret scores differently?
5) Parent Accountability: Why is this never addressed by people outside of the education field? Parents are the ones who spend the most time with their kids and should be just asbut teachers in many cases take the blame for student performance.

I could probably write a long essay on each of these above mentioned areas but I won’t. I am obviously not going to change your mind and you won’t change mine either.

I do feel that we do have some problems in public education. One area for example is that we let students pass on to the next grade level without showing end of your competency in grade level material. This creates a HUGE problem for us educators because we have to teach in a three ring circus to be able to address the needs of all students at all levels.

So I guess my bottom line is just because it might be “broken” doesn’t mean that we need to throw it away. We (educators and non educators) should dedicate ourselves to coming together to try and “fix” the problem.

Buenas Noches – I am off to write lesson plans.

Interesting article, it’s cool to see what Vedder thinks about this, but what do you think? Huh?

HispanicPundit wrote:

I think he is right.

Observer writes:

Ahhh haaaa. Funny stuff.

I look forward to your response.