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Re: [Phys-l] How Much Value is Added at Elite Institutions - Response to Haim #2




On Jan 27, 2011, at 3:55 PM, LaMontagne, Bob wrote:

I have no idea how to respond to that. I thought we were talking about assessing urban schools versus elite schools. Where did "white collar" come from? Marty had stated that only 10% care enough even to show up for parent-teacher conferences - I assume he is talking about urban schools. That 10% could certainly benefit by receiving a voucher that would allow them to afford ("white collar" can already afford this") to go to a real school instead of an institution. We are talking about benefitting blue collar here - or at least I was. Your knee-jerk class warfare response was inappropriate and off the mark.

Indeed, I was referring to the inner city schools. We used to predict who would show up for these conferences, which were held from 2 pm to 7 pm to give people the chance to get home from work and still come to school. It was always the ones who we needed to see the most who never showed up. My wife, who taught for a time in the *sister* high school across town, and I, started calling parents way ahead of time to remind them. Some teachers called often, some did not, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference; after a few calls the same old bad habits returned: sporadic attendance, no homework, forgetting their books or papers, etc, forgetting what they had learned the previous day or even that we had done a lab (this was for earth science or biology.. physics students were much better and I usually didn't have too many problems with those kids. Still, most of the parents of the 9th or 10th graders never showed up for any conferences anyway. Even if we had the guidance counselor call for a conference they had some excuse or promised to come in but didn't show.
As someone said here... it is a certain sub-culture. Many of these kids had: a) single parent homes with non-existent father or father in jail; b) two parents but both worked 12 hour days or one on day work and one at nights; c) no parents but lived with "aunts" (rarely "Uncles"); d) been kicked out of the house (we had one boy living in a car and another who slept in the dog-house until someone reported them to DYFS at which time they were removed and sent to a foster home, which wasn't much better.)
Some kids lived with boy or girl friends, and well over 50% had babies... some with 2 or 3 babies by the time they were 15 yrs old. One boy claimed to have fathered over 10 children with 10 different girls! He was 16 at the time. (true story!)
So, if you give vouchers to the 10% who did everything the right way all the time and left the 90% in status quo, what would that prove? Save the 10% and warehouse the others, because that's basically what we were doing. Our school had a 50% dropout rate between 9th and 11th grade and another 20% from 11th to graduation. The school had 1200- 1300 +/- students: about 500 freshmen 300 sophs, 250 juniors, and maybe 150 graduated in 4 years.
By the time they got to my physics class I had about 70 juniors and seniors in September, and 65 who stuck with it. Calculus was about the same. These were the students who had stuck with school in spite of the grinding poverty and slums they came from. We pushed the seniors to do well and for the most part they excelled in getting into college or finding a vocation that could take them out of the poverty they started in. Those were the kids who we would most likely lose to vouchers early on and then there would be few top students to emulate! If they left I hate to think about what kind of chem or physics classes we would have, if any at all!

Marty

ps: I retired in 1998 when about 30% of 9th graders had passed the state math and reading tests. This past testing year (2010) my old school had around 15% pass math and 12% or so pass reading. The "sister" school where my wife taught English in the 70's had LESS THAN 10% pass reading! Something is definitely wrong with this picture, but you can't put all the blame on the teachers.