Help for potential dropouts
Re “Homework: Burden or Benefit?” (Forum, Jan. 17): The three articles in Sunday’s Forum discussing the value of homework say to me, “Can our middle-class children get into good colleges with less homework?”
The chatter about problems in education is overly focused on college-bound children. What about the fates of the 24 percent of students who drop out of high school? Those who will probably drop out can be identified in grade school. Most come from homes in poverty, many with single moms who mostly earn a substandard wage. Large numbers are immigrants. Yet their needs seem treated as inconsequential.
These dropouts need the skills and information to help them get work providing a proper living and not “just try harder and you, too, can go to college.” Are there large, properly funded national programs to provide them with work skills? What do other nations do? An example: Steven Hill’s new book “Europe’s Promise” relates that one of Germany’s “social capitalism” programs uses European Social Funds for “opening up the labor market to young immigrant school leavers.” The EU accepts that most dropouts (and graduates) will not attend college and focuses on preparing them for the work force. We don’t. We’ve gotta do better.
– Pete Martineau, Fair Oaks
Homework, not make-work
Re “Homework: Burden or Benefit?” (Forum, Jan. 17): As a high school senior in Sacramento, I can tell you honestly that nothing kills a teenager’s weekday evening more than a dreaded stack of homework to be completed before day’s end.
Debate has arisen over the effectiveness of homework and whether or not appropriate amounts are assigned to students. However, a student’s aptitude for homework is not what should assess the effectiveness of homework. Homework’s “worth” should rather be evaluated based on how a teacher uses assigned work in the lesson plan. If a teacher tells you to do 30 math problems purely for practice or to get ahead, there is absolutely no incentive to do the assigned work.
On the contrary, if a teacher assigns three chapters of Shakespeare to read, and you know that the reading will be discussed and actually utilized in the classroom, one is much more likely to complete it. Thus, homework policies should correspond directly with lessons and discussion in class instead of merely to develop good study habits.
So teachers, stop imposing a homework quota on your students, and parents, stop asking for more homework. Just because your kid isn’t doing three hours of homework a night doesn’t mean they’re dumb.
– Jeremy Akiyama, Sacramento
Mixing education metaphors
Re “Running schools as business is wrong course” (Viewpoints, Jan. 16): Walt Gardner’s column confirms the old cliché, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” As a long-time teacher and college lecturer, Gardner illustrates the failure of most of those who are teaching in our schools and universities – no real world experience.
Gardner claims that failure of the St. Louis school district to operate as a business is because schools can’t be run like a business. Gardner makes a significant mistake in his description of how a school should be run like a business. He claims that schools are the employers and the students are the workers. Clearly, Gardner has never worked in a business. The actual example is that the schools are the business (the employers), the teachers are the employees and the students are the customers – not workers.
Instead of lamenting that public schools “must accept virtually all who show up at the schoolhouse door,” the schools should look upon the students as customers who want to “purchase” the school’s service – education. Using the retail store as an example, they (the retail store) accept all customers. This is not “the antithesis of how business operates,” but is exactly how businesses operate.
– Don Simons, Carmichael
Save classrooms for learners
Re “Running schools as business is wrong course” (Viewpoints, Jan. 16): Walt Gardner writes that after a series of legal cases, students have gained the right to due process protections in an effort to guard against abusive actions by educators attempting to curtail disruptive students. He further notes that the expansion and broadened interpretations of students’ legal rights has placed educators in a precarious position which has “had a chilling effect on efforts to maintain an atmosphere conducive to learning.”
As an educator for more than 20 years, I have witnessed countless disruptions where these laws have effectively undermined teachers and administrators in their efforts to remove disruptive students from the classroom, either temporarily or permanently. No doubt these laws have protected students from unjust actions, but they have also permitted disruptive students to remain in class longer than they should.
While attention has focused on incompetent teachers, parents and taxpayers should not lose sight of the fact that disruptive students shortchange all students of their education. Failure to adequately address this question will leave the education of our students in an educational triage characterized by special programs and other Band-Aid approaches employed to raise test scores rather than addressing the root of the problem – ensuring classrooms conducive to learning.
– Sharon Quinsland, El Dorado Hills
Consolidate schools to save
Re “Budget plan puzzles schools” (Our Region, Jan. 14): There were several comments related to how school districts had cut administrative costs “to the bone” and how difficult it will be to achieve the governor’s request to reduce administrative costs by 10 percent. And then there was the striking comment from Twin Rivers Unified School District Superintendent Frank Porter that through consolidation of three elementary school districts that “by July the district will have cut administrative costs in half.” In related news, I learned that more than 55 percent of California’s 1,130 school districts serve fewer than 2,500 students – 80 percent of these serve fewer than 1,500 students. Seems like the course California should take is obvious.
– John Finegan, Sacramento
Haiti needs a new start
The devastation and loss of life in Haiti caused by the 7.0 earthquake is just one chapter of its tragic history. The rest is slavery – started in 1517 by the Spaniards, brutal and rapacious French colonialism and neglect by the world after a successful slave revolt and independence gained in 1804, self-misrule and corruption. The end result has been a country mired in poverty and instability, long considered one of the poorest nations in the world.
I agree with those who advocate a complete rebuild of Haiti: schools, hospitals, infrastructure, clean food and water, political and social stability, a free enterprise market economy, favorable trade agreements, foreign capital and investment – all the things we hear and read about so essential to becoming a viable and self-sustaining nation.
A tall order indeed, but a wonderful humanitarian undertaking in contrast to the senseless killing and destruction so rampant in this world.
– Bill Harder Sr., Auburn
His epitaph is a catchphrase
Re “The ‘D’ Word; In most published remembrances, loved ones dance around death – but does it really help anyone?” (Living Here, Jan. 19): As a former avid fisherman, I have told my wife and kids that I want my “passing away” to be phrased this way: “Got my limit, going home!”
– Dick Rooney, Lincoln