Every single teacher she's had since 2nd grade should be fired on the spot without appeal, and the retired ones should have their pensions yanked.

That is one of the WORST examples of "education" I've ever heard.

And frankly, someone should bitchslap her parents a few hundred goddamned times for letting their child stay illiterate.

Cities need to take a firm hold of their school systems.

Stop letting piss poor teachers hide in the system, hire and fire at the local level, ignore the damned union, hire out of school, pay a very good living wage to draw talent into the field and keep it.

Don't hire empty suits to sit behind desks to be the administration, hire people who realize the system is there for the students, not the students from the system. A city could do worse than hiring only parents whose children attend the school to be administrators.

And parents...for fucks sake...take action if YOUR, yes YOUR (you pay for it, your child goes there, it exists for your and your progeny) school administrators do stupid things like suspend or expel children for cake knives and inhalers.

Above all, know your own child to be sure he or she is actually learning.

I recommend making the library one of the places your kids know best. Start going in there the moment your kids figure out that books aren't something to eat.

That's just a great column -- well worth the click-through. My favorite quote:

"I would classify myself as a hater when it comes to social promotion," Bobb said.

Robert, it's entirely possible that I'm projecting or misinterpreting here, but I'm willing to bet that her parents (or known parent) aren't in much better shape, academically, than she is. This isn't to say I'm letting them off the hook -- just that I doubt this is a case where Mummy and Daddy were too wrapped up with themselves to pay attention to their kid.

Amen Robert. Fabulous consequences. But do we even know her teachers could read??

"It's just a setup against the teachers and students of Detroit," said Steve Conn, an activist and math teacher at Cass Technical High School for the past 25 years.

Um, it's not AGAINST the students. Nice try with that famous teachers' union cry, "BUT (my fat pay raise during a Recession, even though I've not met my contract's stated goals of literate students) IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!"

CHEERS for Robert Bobb (though I can't imagine he'll last long with as unpopular a decision he's made), and shame on Steve Conn. I'm so sick of these slacker scumbags who think they're working the hardest job on the planet for pennies. Their salaries are posted on state government websites. They're not going broke, and not with their fat pensions. I know teachers who make a difference, and this prick Steve Conn is NOT one of them, he only makes excuses when logical people like Bobb hold their feet to the fire. What a crybaby. Try being a paramedic in an urban setting, making less than $10 an hour and no bennies, trying to intubate a patient while getting shot at. Try working in a paper mill in the South, earning $8.75 an hour, and it's over 130 degrees on the dryer end of the mill, drinking two gallons of Gatorade a day and yet still not having enough fluids in your body to urinate. Try getting up at 2 a.m. to plow the streets of the city in a blizzard before going to your REAL job. You have to do this because you're trying to come up with the extra money to pay your property taxes since the school referendum passed and you got nailed with an increase that you can't afford.

WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH. The teachers at my kids' private school do it with FAR LESS (literally half of the funds that the public schools get per student) and EVERY KID CAN READ, even the ones with a diagnosis. Why? Because THEY are the ones truly there for the kids.

Sorry about the rant. This REALLY pissed me off (blushes)

And to think, my parents were accused of not caring about my education because they homeschooled me.

I'm totally with you. Graduating kids who can read their own diplomas is "just a set-up"? Let's have that set-up across the country.

Cass Tech was a good school when I was growing up. How disgusting.

You overestimate the amount of power teachers have. I promise you, if a teacher fails a kid, and the parents come in and complain... that kid is going to end up passing. I see it all the time... if a kid complains to the department head or principal/headmaster/dean/whatever, the kid's grade is going to be changed.

The teachers don't get much say in this. In theory they can fight and say no, but its taking a big risk for them.

And it's so easy to verify whether they can read at each grade level, too; all you have to do is have each child read aloud from a book of the appropriate grade level. No more complicated than that.

There's a problem here in NY for a few years with new standardized testing. 4th grade no longer exists. Its a year designed to teach the kids to score high on those tests to avoid being reported as the schools that can't pass in Newsday.

Kids should leave elementary school knowing at least the basic fundamentals. I had an argument with an administrator because I felt my son's spelling skills were very poor and I seemed to be the only one working on them with him. The administrator's answer was that there is spell check when he goes out in the world. My response was why teach math then with calculators.

It's a lot of factors: teachers, administration, and others. Really, though, there is one fundamental problem: the federal government has no business meddling in education.

Schools must be managed locally. Districts where parents care about education will be well-run. Districts where parents think school is a day-care center will be lousy. Responsibility will be where it belongs: with the parents.

With the federal government involved, there is nothing you can do to improve your local school. Schools are driven by test-obsessed, micromanaging, faceless bureaucrats.

Look at the latest: the federal government trying to dictate what kind of food should be available to students! Ok, junk food is not great, but is this really (really?!) something the federal government should be involved in?

"teachers should be fired"

Haha, that's pretty funny. Union.

Conn said he knows the high school assessment tests include things the students have not been taught.

Yeah... like reading...

In fairness to the teachers, these policies arise from administrators and executives at the district level or higher. They're used to cycle students out of the district to avoid backlogs that strain the capacity and resources of schools. The case of the NYC schools is illustrative of this. They've tried twice to eliminate social promotion but have reinstated the policy due to the budgetary impact. By not removing these students, they're increasing student rolls, which reduces per student spending. So it's a bit like triage, very poor students are let go so that there are resources for the ones that have some potential.

I remember a comic strip that I read called Tangents. A jock was asking his studious intellectual roommate how to spell fairly easy words. Finally, at "How do you spell ignorance?" the jock's roommate replied, "F-O-O-T-B-A-L-L S-C-H-O-L-A-R-S-H-I-P."

"With the federal government involved, there is nothing you can do to improve your local school. Schools are driven by test-obsessed, micromanaging, faceless bureaucrats."

These problems were not *caused* by testing; they long pre-date testing. The testing was put in place in a desperate attempt to shame the schools into actually teaching *something*.

Public schools will not be fixed unless there is meaningful competition. What would the quality of GM and Chrysler cars look like today if imports had been strictly forbidden?

Again,

Please reference your movies for further info.

See this one for the general gist of Amy's column.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264464/

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0004039/

As for who I personally love, because he makes damn sure all his players grow up:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1266717/

A friend of mine is a teacher for "at-risk" (note, this does not mean "learning disabled" - it is critical to note this difference) students. She teaches 8th-graders at a middle school in one of the poorer neighborhoods, and mind you this is Des Moines, Iowa, not Detroit. It is one of two "failing schools" and so was targeted for a legion of these bureaucrats, thanks to the "No Child Left Behind" program. They call them SILs, or School Improvement something-or-others. They make $75K a year.

My friend has been deluged with a wave of surveys and tracking devices. She even has to tally the number of times she uses goofy buzzwords like "progress" or whatnot during class. She does say, however, that the SILs won't totally intrude on the class yet or attempt to run it. In one meaningless exercise, they had to track the percentage of students who turned in their "sheets." It was 90%, which meant ... that 90% of the students turned in their sheets. One week it reached 100%, so it was decided that they didn't need to track that anymore; the goal had been reached.

It's simply monstrous. I've never seen my friend so brokenhearted - she always used to love her job.

...it's entirely possible that I'm projecting or misinterpreting here, but I'm willing to bet that her parents (or known parent) aren't in much better shape, academically, than she is. - marion

I recommend making the library one of the places your kids know best. Start going in there the moment your kids figure out that books aren't something to eat. - old rpm daddy

When her son fell to the bottom of his class and was developing discipline problems, Sonya Carson restricted his television watching and his play time, insisting he finish his homework. She also took his brother and him to the library every week and required that they read two books and give her written reports.

This was despite the fact that she only had a third grade education and could not read the reports they wrote. She was also working three jobs at the time.

One of her jobs was cleaning houses. She noticed that rich people had books in their houses and poor people didn't.

Her son, Ben, went on to graduate high school with honors, graduated from Yale University with a degree in Psychology, and went to medical school at the University of Michigan. At 33, he became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

They even made a movie about him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson

When I've made a suitable fortune, the FIRST thing I'm going to do is go in hard and fast to hammer the idiocracy that is running...or should I say ruining...my favorite city's schools.

Its disgraceful.

My children are home schooled, and do a thousand times better because of it.

This topic always brings to mind a story my friend told me about one of his high school teachers. This was at a school where, between freshman and graduation, the number of students was nearly halved because of drop-outs. The solution, it was decided, was to make attendance (ie, just showing up) a significant percentage of the grade in each class, to reward kids for showing up and giving them a better chance at passing, which, in turn, was supposed to encourage them to stay in school.

My friend's teacher famously responded, "Great. So I'm supposed to pass the furniture too, then? These desks are here every day."

Since he is banning social promotion, he will probably be called a raaaaaaaaaaaacist.

The administrator's answer was that there is spell check when he goes out in the world.

I'd fire his @$$, if I were in charge.

I'm frankly surprised that Robert Bobb hasn't been run out of Detroit yet. He's the first breath of common sense in the DPS for decades, so everyone who works in and for the school system just hates him with a hot, hot hate.

Last year, he made all the employees of the system show up in person to collect their checks. The number of no-shows was so staggering that it was never seriously reported in the Detroit media. Go ahead - try and find out how many ghost workers and no-shows this simple approach flushed form the system. Launch codes are easier to discover.

He's now trying to get scholastic as well as financial control of the system. This may be the final straw, the threat to the eye-glazing corruption and incompetence of the DPS system that gets him his walking papers. Would be a pity - he's a fine man who is really trying to get DPS back to some semblance of being a functioning school system.

Bobb is African-American, by-the-bye.

llater,

llamas

Wow!!!

http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=10832

Bobb is African-American, by-the-bye.

Even better! He's a double-secret self-hating racist. Probably a tea-bagger too. Never can be too careful when you're insulting someone who rises up against the union.

Also, while teachers are understandably happy about getting certain students to read ANYTHING for fun (because they come from bookless homes where the adults just don't LIKE reading - or can't read) it's still time to remember that middle-school kids from more fortunate homes should not be praised for reading baby books instead of playing video games. In other words, many kids are simply spoiled when it comes to parental exapectations as to how they spend their spare time.

Here's what I posted elsewhere on Feb. 12th:

Why do so many parents understand that "you are what you eat" but not "you are what you do"? In other words, just because kids are deprived of
escapist/passive "screen time" in school (and that is less and less the case these days, what with TV taking over for teachers so often), that is NO reason to let kids have a 20-hour MINIMUM per week, at home, of videogames / texting / TV / Internet!

To put it another way,

1) you wouldn't let your kids be on a home diet that was 80% fat and sugar on the grounds that they don't get to indulge themselves like that during the school lunch.

2) Elementary school kids, on average, probably have FEWER than 30 hours a week of leisure time when you subtract (from 168 hours) the time needed for eating, sleeping, school, homework, transportation, chores, and maybe one extracurricular activity.

3) So, doesn't it stand to reason that they should be spending at least 20 hours or more of that time on essential activities such as outdoor exercise, face-to-face socializing, creative play, and...oh yes....READING? (Keep in mind, too, that even reading is time spent sitting down, so you need to exercise all the more!)

4) Allowing kids to have visual electronics in their bedrooms clearly doesn't help them to maintain the quota from point 3. Dr. Spock (whom
I consider to be somewhat unfairly maligned) naively wrote, in "Baby and Child Care," that it IS OK for kids to have a TV in the bedroom,
but he changed his mind....in the mid-late 1960s. All I wonder is, what took him so long to smarten up? However, I don't remember his
ever speaking AGAINST the practice, unfortunately.

Jim Trelease, the author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," told of how, in the 1970s, his kids started complaining about the family evening read-aloud time because "it takes away too much time from the TV." Taking a tip from another family, he and his wife decided there would only be TV watching on weekends from then on. The kids cried every night for FOUR MONTHS. But it was worth it. Their grades shot up, as did their
literacy skills; family fights plunged, etc. etc.

Seems to me the only way to make sure that the time for essential activities doesn't get wiped out is to enforce the same rule while the
kids are young.

Trelease quoted Paul Copperman from his book, "The Literacy Hoax": "Consider what a child misses during the 15,000 hours (from birth to age 17) he spends in front of the TV screen. He is not working in the garage with his father, or in the garden with his mother. He is not doing homework, or reading, or collecting stamps. He is not cleaning his room, washing the supper dishes or cutting the lawn. He is not
listening to a discussion about community politics among his parents and their friends. He is not playing baseball or going fishing or
painting pictures. Exactly what does television offer that is so valuable it can replace these activities that transform an impulsive, self-absorbed child into a critically-thinking adult?"

P.S. Rumor has it that employers are becoming more and more desperate for workers both willing and able to deal well with clients on the
phone and/or in person - and too many young people aren't willing or able because they're used to texting more than anything else.