In a nutshell I suppose you and your students are born yesterday compared to myself and my experiences – thus the gap between our ways of thinking. I see your comments – I’ve heard the same thing for decades now. If we let you continue your way, you believe things will change and all will work out. Well, no. Things just get worse – the stats and scores get worse and the behavior gets worse.

I will tell you my family has over 4 generations of teachers (certain members at certain times) going back into the 19th Century. From Black segregated schools through integration to the present – secondary, college & grad school educators, State Schools to Black Colleges. The extended family is out of education and into Professional and Technical occupations now. I am comfortable that I know what works and what doesn’t in (black) education. What leads to success and what doesn’t.

Thus my comments about OUSD and what it is doing to the students. You can’t expect us to agree on much at all – you are doing things based on what feels good now. I’m not. Our brand of education usually didn’t feel so good in the making anyway. And you must understand that I don’t require approval from you & the students here. All I’m interested in is results. Are your students doing better in life than was expected for them?

Have a nice weekend.

Cranky: The current education decline is largely because of politicians and the courts. The teachers are swept along in the tide. I don’t think teachers should be punished for bad students. I do believe teachers should be punished when that don’t get results from a given block of students that are reasonably expected.

Where we disagree is on assessing what that status quo is — in other words, how the sausage is getting made. You have been blaming people who are not actually making the decisions that matter.

congratulations on your psat scores, too. your thoughtful argument and evidence in your post make it clear that you are going to have a great time in college and your classes will benefit from your perspective.

my only advice: drop the abbreviation/foul language if you want people to hear you. like it or not, we are judged for everything we do. using “wtf” in your handle only makes it easier for people to ignore what you say as they stupidly think they were right all along. they are the ones you need to force into appreciating you; the rest of us already do.

nextset, since you are so keen to tell us how to do our jobs, might i inquire as to what your occupation is? i’d also like to know the last time you set foot in a high school. these are genuine inquiries, not rhetorical questions.

everything you say about curriculum and how we treat our kids is so absolutely bass ackwards there is no way you have experience to back it up. it is astounding how many unfounded generalizations you make when discussing what and how we teach our kids.

the sad part is that we agree on much of how this world is and what it is becoming, but you are such a condescending know-it-all, it makes it painful to admit we have ideas in common.

our students are NOT taught that they get what they want, when they want. there absolutely is not a sense of “they owe me.” in fact, black history is taught to teach students about the incredibly hard work it took for people of color to become recognized and treated as equals by whites in this country. we don’t teach about slavery or reparations; we teach about the upstanders and their quest to use knowledge as their weapon. we teach about the value of being educated and how that is what will truly help you survive life as a minority. fair or unfair, we are a “tribalistic” society. i teach my kids that because to do otherwise would be a lie and THAT would leave them unprepared for real life. if no one ever taught them the rules of the game, how in the world could they ever expect to win?

i know it pains you to see your assumptions proven wrong, so there is no doubt you’ll make another cheap, snarky remark about how great my school is and the line that’s forming, but know this: by teaching reading and writing skills using a curriculum that focuses on the people i serve and not the people that dehumanize them, my students’ english test scores rose 15% last year. it was the only high school english class in the DISTRICT to have made double-digit gains.

black history month, and other heritage or culturally based celebrations, have ZERO negative impact on our students’ educations. is reading “narrative of the life of frederick douglass” or “a lesson before dying” instead of “romeo and juliet” somehow dumbing my students down? will writing character analysis essays that integrate historical situations somehow limit their horizons? maybe it will be when we read “escape from slavery” in march that i destroy my kids’ futures. or perhaps i’ll handicap them when we read “breaking through” in may. i’m not sure why this literature will only make them fit for a job at the local BK and prevent them from surviving our “bnw.” please, enlighten me.

*the quotes are used for book titles because i wasn’t sure if comments are html enabled

How is this for short – proof is in the pudding. When OUSD shows decent stats people will respect it.

And I am tired of being the skunk at the garden party.

In fact, the “progressive ed” or multicultural focus or “social consciousness” teachers in OUSD are a small minority of rebels at the bottom of the system food chain, and always have been — and are almost completely nonexistent in the district administration. While the school board in the ’80s got a lot of press over Ebonics, the schools have always been churning out a dry distillate of discipline-based, state-mandated, textbook-and-worksheet dependent teaching.

To blame a “counterculture” of teachers for the product of its avowed opposite (and enemy), the dominant educational bureaucracy, is just inane.

But hey, don’t let that get in the way of your stereotyping of and army of clueless, guilty white liberal teachers trying to hug black kids into college!

So here’s a lesson.

Military service wasn’t my choice. I had other choices. Huge numbers of people don’t have the choices I had. When you grow up you may meet – or learn about – the hordes of people in the United States who used the military to escape the pre-programmed fate that was set for them by their circumstances. There are a LOT of goodies tied to military service that can be used by foreign nationals and poor people all over this country to get into skilled labor, higher education and the professions in the USA.

My father & grandfather, uncles, were veterans – no surprise for the times. Their service was connected to professional training and practice. In my own career I was trained by WWII veterans. So I know how military service can take cannery workers to Law and Medicine. I have seen foster children who had nothing – no home, no family and no-one to take care of them – go into the military, travel and live around the world for 10 years or so – and eventually settle into civillian life as higher earning skilled workers. These particular people would have been expected to be (prematurely) dead just like their parents.

Some foolish people here think that I am touting militarism because I mention it here. Quite the opposite. I see that our urban public schools help disqualify people for military servive so that’s one more avenue of escape closed to black and underclass youth thanks to politically charged educators who do not see their responsibility as improving the mortality rates of their students. A graduating student from OUSD should be qualified to enter the military is they want to use that option, not disqualified due to rotten verbal skills and deportment problems. Yes, the black military disqualification rate is huge and larger than any other ethnic group. I believe the public school failures are involved in the miserable failure rate.

Public schooling is supposed to open doors and create opportunity. It can’t do that when it’s products are carefully taught not to speak standard english. OUSD verbal scores are at or near the lowest in the state/nation. Black English doesn’t cut it in this Brave New World.

And as far as racial pride, Students like you don’t need any until you have your own accomplishments to be proud of. Racial Pride is tribalism. There is no place for it in public school. (Although I do know of people in LA who go to Jewish Secondary Schools…)

I don’t need to change your mind – live your life any way you want. While you are young you still have opportunities to move one way or another. You can’t see the doors closing, you might hear them. As you get older you may notice that people are slipping away. I see young people growing up and no longer acknowledging on the street people they once went to school with. At some point you will have to decide which side you want to be with.

And another thing – psat scores are interesting, but there is more to making it in society than that. The competiton in OUSD has not prepared you at all for what you will face in a competitive college or university. Your post clearly shows that to me. And you don’t even realize it. You will have in interesting time, I think.

standardized tests and state requirements do not help students in the real world. yes, at my high school i CAN have it my way. students like me can intern at places that we want, and take classes that we want. we can pursue our passions, and we are encouraged to do so. and yet, i passed the high school exit exam on the first try, as well as scored a 68 out of 80 on my psat. apparently, there IS a method to our madness.

having students discover their “cultural pride and identity” is not a bad thing. on the contrary, i think it motivates student to form better work habits and actually try to achieve. who really wants to work hard just to feed the system that oppresses us?

so you can go on working your 9 to 5 job at a big corporation all your life in hopes of living the american dream. we’ll go on learning our “Afrocentric nonsense” and see where it takes us.

That is no surprise. Poorly raised Students – at least Urban Students – think they should do what they want, when they want, if they want.

Well that’s not the way life works. What your describe is a school that is interested in appeasement not education (or training).

You only have 3 or 4 years of high school to take enough education to be able to manage yourselves in the military, private industry or higher education (or prison/streets). It is no secret what the statistics are for the OUSD kids as to who goes where. It is the duty of OUSD to prepare the students to the extent possible for life at age 18.

I don’t have a problem with a fling, a hunch, a creative interest, etc.. that’s why we have electives. However I do require a public school to cover the state requirements and to reasonably try to get the students to pass the exit exam. Mind you that for some students that will never happen and we can see that by 9th grade. Still, OUSD will do what it can for them.

OUSD has a mission. I believe the miserable scores and vocational results to date do not argue for much if any Afrocentric nonsense. That’s just my opinion. Do what you want.