|
Colleges
know it. They have to set up remedial courses for incoming
freshmen just to prepare them for classes. The politicians
say they know it. They hold hearings to grill education
“experts,” and they hold high-powered education “summits” to
debate and discuss the “problem.” And they keep coming up
with more federal programs and dictate more standards and
spend more taxpayer dollars to fix the problem. But the
problem continues to explode. Why?
Frankly,
any parent can find the answer simply by looking through
their child's textbooks or taking a close look at the
classroom structures that their children are forced to
endure. If you look around at today's children, you will
notice they are different. The access to information, media
stimulus and advanced communication abilities requires that
they be experts in thinking strategies and decision making
ability. They need to be lifelong learners since their
careers will change during their working years. They need a
curriculum that does not focus on acquisition of basic facts
but on the process of learning. Sure phonics, spelling, math
computation and the like are valuable, but they are one
piece of a balanced approach.
With the
blink of an eye, these basic facts are being mandated as the
entire curriculum. Right now, the way public education
functions are being rewritten, and since educators are not
on the author list, politicians, with corporate America in
their back pocket, are writing curricula that they want.
We
cannot correct what's wrong with public education using
mandatory tests. The main problem with public education,
including TPS, is that it is a political institution
controlled by politicians! They have screwed it up but, as
usual, they will not admit their own failings and instead
blame teachers, students and parents. We are in the era of
political correctness and crack brain theories that now flow
out of schools like odors out of an outhouse. We have
overcome the old segregated schools of the Civil Rights Era,
and yet our schools now segregate according to the students’
ability. One of the cruelest things public education has
done is to implement the idea of segregating students by
ability, or at least by what the school thinks are their
abilities. That is a system of vicious labeling and does
great psychological harm. How would you like to be labeled a
“slow learner?”
Uniform
results are impossible because students are not uniform.
They are all different. They differ in IQ, general health,
family background and genetic inclinations. A good teacher
simply tries to get from every student his or her best
effort. That is the way it should be.
We have,
and have had for a number of years, a generally sorry class
of politicians. They are masters of evasion. The real
problem, which is becoming public, is the policy of social
promotion. Rather than cause a hassle, school bureaucrats
had crafted various schemes to promote children whether they
learned any of the material or not.
I wonder
if the politicians and teachers ever considered WHY students
can be disruptive and unwilling to come to class? Their
ability to fail a failing student is to not understand where
we are as a people. Let's use Libbey High School as an
example. As a teacher you go out and master the higher
education that the Europeans have designed for themselves
and you try to instill that knowledge in black children. We
rejected as much as we failed to comprehend the things we
didn't think would help us. That's our creative intelligence
at its best. Slaves weren't lazy, they just weren't being
paid. The European curriculum that is failing our youth is
being heralded as a much needed vehicle in OUR society. Why?
Most of us have succeeded in life not because of that
knowledge but because of what we have learned subsequent to
(and in spite of) that education.
You will
as teachers never be able to hold the attention of the
majority of students who don't look forward to coming to
your classes. Why is the education that you are providing so
out of touch that kids sleep through your lessons? The
school system will never change the curriculum to
accommodate the needs of our black kids. You compound their
misery by giving them a failing grade when in fact you have
failed to understand that you are a pawn in their failure.
These kids walk around school suppressing their knowledge
because they know that something is wrong with the
information that is being taught. Even a young child can
figure out and understand that they are not the focus of an
effort to educate them but are more a by product of what
they decide to learn.
To
continue to teach in a system that has a staggering failure
rate is to continue to get paid. I hear teachers say that
they must teach what the school systems want. Did you go
away to get that education to fail someone already suffering
from the ills of low self esteem, etc. The people who
control the school system obviously think that they have
theirs and the kids have theirs to get. To not understand
this cycle of dysfunction is to be blinded by your mastery
of irrelevant subject matters. To fail our children for not
mastering subjects you just learned to master as an adult is
treason. Your stringent, structured, society approach to
education is suffocating the life out of kids who could
master the world with a little help from a realistic
teacher. I guess you have bills to pay and can't look out
for our children in spite of your failure to deliver an
education designed to fail.
The
politicians are doing what they want, when they want and how
they want with no accountability to anyone, except how much
money they can get in their personal pockets, at the expense
of our children's education and future. The public-school
industry – and that's what it has become – is too riddled
with entrenched bureaucrats and too politicized. The TPS
curriculum and policies have derailed the academics of a
generation of Toledo's children. Just take a look at the OGT
scores, they represent a social injustice to our children.
How long will we wander in this wilderness? It is time to
take a stand!
Hold
TPS accountable! Don't Hurt Our Children...VOTE NO ON THE
TPS LEVY, ISSUE 7!
Bishop
Stephen Ward may be contacted at:
pastorsmward@yahoo.com |
