February 28, 2010 in Letters

Dropout link unproven

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A recent article mentioned an upcoming push for a $5 million annual levy to fund the “Children’s Investment Fund.” Supporters claim this fund “could improve Spokane’s graduation rate” by up to 20 percent. This claim is based on the presumption that Spokane’s 40 percent dropout rate is due to problems in early childhood learning, abuse/neglect, lack of mentoring and insufficient extracurricular activities.

How? The article provides no statistics, data or logical argumentation.

Asked about our dropout rate at a Feb. 20 town hall meeting, Spokane Superintendent Nancy Stowell speculated without proof that the 40 percent figure might be incorrect, implausibly connected dropout rates with improved learning standards and discussed the need for intervention. Then she sat down. (That’s her $175,500/year answer, folks.) Other attendees blamed parents, students, social issues and funding.

Meanwhile, students suffer with a long list of weak curricula and supplementary materials; constant “discovery” learning (where they’re supposed to teach themselves) and days cluttered with nonacademic activities. For years, teachers haven’t been allowed to teach enough arithmetic or algebra. Some parents are told that phonics “don’t work.”

Reject the levy and the excuses. Schools need clutter-free days, better curricula and freedom for teachers to directly teach necessary material.

Laurie H. Rogers

Spokane

One comment on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  misjustice on February 28 at 7:32 a.m.

  Here’s a radical suggestion: quit teaching to the test. NO
  Child Left (behind) is an unfunded federal mandate to the states, too much time is spent prepping and teaching to the test. And then the test “results” are used as a measurement of educational success/failure, and as a means to punish students and schools alike.

  It is my observation that, the skill of critical thinking is no longer taught. Kids graduate high school and can not write a cogent, complex sentence, do not understand basic subject verb agreement concepts, even with the use of computer word processsing programs. I can remember my freshman year of high school and the months spent in English class diagraming sentences….as kids, we hated it but we learned the components of sentence structure. And this was all pre-computer programs.

  Throw out NO Child Left and return to the basics. Teach our kids how to critically evaluate source materials, how to make a logical argument, how to write a basic sentence, and yes, how to do simple algebra. These skills are essential, basic and great building blocks for life as well as higher learning. Too many of our kids that do graduate high school, and go on to higher learning, have to take remedial classes at the college level because they never aquired basic skills in the K-12 arena.