Thornton Closing

You can chalk it up to the economy and you won’t be completely wrong, but it’s also not the whole picture. Education is suffering much worse than the banks or the housing market  in this country, and that’s a crisis no one is talking about.

We live in a very wealthy county (Montgomery) in which statistics are regularly trotted out to show how well we educate our children. A graduation rate of 80% was cited as being among the top in the country.

The graduation rate is not the dropout rate, which is about 1 of 3 children nationwide. The graduation rate is simply how many students who enter thier senior year graduate at the end of it. 1 of 5 doesn’t make it, and this is cited as a shining example of how well we are doing. Meanwhile, the 33% of teens who never even graduate high school – what are we doing to address them?

I am convinced that small schools such as Thornton hold promise for a new kind of education which we desperately need. That model faces many serious hurdles – including how to be more financially accessible – but it is a generation ahead of our current public model of large, impersonal institutions where teachers are one step away from being replaced by computers and no one sees the devastating loss that represents.

I am still a bit in shock over Thornton, and my heart breaks when I think about the kids and their families, as well as the teachers who (like me) are now part of the unemployment statistic. But I really mourn for all of our children – whether they are being well educated or not – because as a group, they are being criminally under-served. How to face the crises of the next 50 years when one-third of your generation is uneducated?

Branford Marsalis on Students

Adolescent Texting

From a NY Times article, the following (my emphasis):

“American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day”

If they are awake 16 hours, that’s 5 per hour, or one every 12 minutes, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed, through class, meals, work, and everything else, 7 days a week.

 There’s a very important point the author makes about how teens need silence and privacy in order to realize themselves, and how this amount of texting does not allow that.

Read the full article here

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26teen.html?_r=1

Early success of NYC iSchool inspires plans for 40 more within 3 years

A New York City high school that received a failing grade before its technology- and project-based curriculum was launched in September has been so successful with its interdisciplinary, high-tech student projects that city officials are said to be planning 40 more schools with the same model. "Adolescents want to do work that’s important and that has relevance to the world, not just something that gets finished and turned in on a piece of paper to a teacher," said co-Principal Mary Moss.

 

Read the rest of the story.