June graduations beg the question: What is our future?

Drop-out distress?
Well, as an educator for 38+ years, I've some thoughts about the problems/solutions:
1. Where did Oprah build her schools? In Africa--because she said the children in the U.S. don't want to learn. They want things. They don't want to study or become leaders. They have no passion. Is she correct, misinformed, preferential?
a. The culture of the U.S. teaches children/us to want things, to consume, to buy and to have more things.
b. Name one leader in America that youth admire and want to imitate.
c. How much drugs, alcoholic drinks, nocotine cigarettes, mercury, lead, pesticides, meat-carrying-hormones, and other toxins have entered the brains of U.S. children, before and after birth, during the past 25 years--affecting their learning?
d. How many children of divorce live in the U.S.?
e. Compared to other countries, how many families in the U.S. live with relatives, share their work and daily lives, and carry on family traditions?
f. Why do we expect ONE teacher to be responsible for managing the time, space, materials and educational curriculum of a class of 30+ students in a public school classroom, day after day? Can we model cooperation, collaboration, mutual respect, brain-storming, and socratic questions if we're teaching "for the test?"
g. How many children are on medications for depression, hyperactivity, mood disorders, inattention, impulse-control disorders?
h. What do children and youth do in their free time? How do kids "Play?"
i. What are children in America "passionate" about?
2. Education is not a simple matter. We do not have a mono-culture in America. We have diversity. We speak different languages, have different customs, values, and religions. We identify with various ethnic and racial groups. Pluralism and diversity complicate yet enrich educational experiences. We also have different styles of learning how to learn.
a. The All Kinds of Minds Institute.org explains how each student can be guided to discover the strengths and challenges within one's scope of acquiring, organizing, remembering, analyzing, summarizing, synthesizing and applying information. Some schools in America are using this approach to embrace the rich potential of gifts that each student has been given and how these gifts can be used in the service of others to benefit the entire community. All schools could benefit from this approach.
b. The Black Star Project.org stresses to parents of minority students (African-American, Hispanic, and Native American) how to help their sons and daughters become successful learners in an academic environment and to value their role as the child's first and most important teacher.
c. Who is caring for U.S. children? In too many cases, people with good intentions but ineffective methods for securing the child's trust and cooperation are in charge. Often, it is slightly older youth who are the tutors, recreation leaders, babysitters, or caregivers. In Centers, the turnover of caregivers is high due to many factors, chiefly low wages and benefits. Therefore, how can children make sense of a revolving-door assortment of people who come and go so easily? Did you know that babies and young children need ONE speech model, ONE SECURE ATTACHMENT relationship--to imitate, to help them "decode" the meaning of the world around them? With too many people "helping" them, they shut down, turn off, and withdraw, because it is simply too overstimulating. The brain protects them....
d. Not all tutors and teachers are trained and supervised well enough. They need support and kindness in order to provide support and kindness to children--in addition to the content they are teaching or re-teaching.
e. While computers can expand one's learning, they are tools for creating and sharing KNOWLEDGE and WISDOM--which happens best through a dependable, wise, caring RELATIONSHIP with another human being. How many children sit before screens instead of with a loving person, at the end of the day?
f. Education takes time. The book, "The Hurried Child" was popular years ago. There are consequences of overscheduling, over-reaching, over-taxing.
3. There can be no learning without mutual respect and positive conflict resolution. How many adults in the U.S. model self-respect? How many adults in the U.S. know how to manage their anger positively instead of negatively? How do we teach patience, tolerating frustration, dealing with differences, admitting to mistakes? Do we even know, as a nation, what these words mean?
a. How many prisons are there to deal with those who have hurt others?
b. How many prisons are there that perpetuate violence?
c. How many schools seem like prisons?
d. How many prisons have schools?
America's drop-out problems are not insoluble. But who will lead the way?

As an educator for over 1/3 of a century, it continually boils my blood when non-educator/social experimenters attempt to explain just what is so very wrong with our schools. The root of the problem is often the very causes they expound; in this case, ILLEGAL immigration.
While dedicated educators struggle to teach in cramped classrooms containing 35 or more, another teacher, paid equally as much, works one-on-one with an illegal who speaks no English, thus draining educational funds. These illegals flock to crowded cities to hide, drown urban educational systems, and cause the very urban dropout rates the author decries.
Ignore Fox News, the American Dream is dead! The economy is not strong and will never recover in our lifetimes. Foreign trade balance and strength of the American Dollar vs. foreign currency had been the measure of economic strength for decades. Care to discuss either? When 78 million "Boomers" begin drawing out their retirement securities, which account for 85% of all stock portfolios, the market will begin a downward spiral unseen in history.
For the first time in American history our current crop of students CANNOT ever hope to reach or exceed the levels of their parents; in education, professional occupations, or even home ownership! I agree that we cannot finance this current or any future war. However, nor can we afford to assume Third World uneducated illegals on a wholesale rate. We as Americams are incapable of the means to bring these illegals up to our levels. But by their sheer numbers, these illegals are totally capable of lowering our standard of living to theirs. When this occurs, who will offer aid then?

Shifting federal spending from “weapons” and “walls designed to seal our borders” and “high tech spying and technological Big Brother houses” and towards education (“teachers” and “schools” and “day care and Head Start programs” and “tutors”) is an attractive idea. It definitely sells well. However, just throwing money at education is hardly a wise idea, given:

• the Census Bureau’s report for 2005 that U.S. spending per pupil, grades K-12, was an average of $8,701 (NY the high spender at $14,119 and UT the low at $5,257), exceeding by far the average of every other country in the world;
• the World Economic Forum’s 2006 ranking of 125 countries according to their “preparedness for the new economy ... based on student math and science achievement” placing the United States 15th on the list behind the likes of Finland and Singapore, and even Malaysia and Tunisia, and tied with Barbados.

Apparently foundational education in the USA doesn’t deliver what its highest-ranking funding promises it should. If still higher funding is advisable, should higher priority should be given to:

• ferreting out sex abusing teachers?
• hardening school security against guns, knives, and bullying?
• strengthening class discipline?
• tightening teaching and learning standards?

Too, I have to admit I find it intriguing that your posting was on the very day D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Barnoff ruled against the plaintiff in the case of Pearson versus Custom Cleaners. And why? Well, "education" is a word with cachet,

• and Roy L. Pearson has a lot of both: a baccalaureate from the very expensive Lake Forest College and a J.D. from the even more expensive Northwestern University School of Law, ultimately enabling his appointment as an administrative law judge for Washington, D.C;
• and Soo, Jin Nam, and Ki Y Chung, the owners of Custom Cleaners, have little of either: immigrants of humble background coming to the United States in 1992 in search of “a little bit better life”.

And Pearson used his mighty education to slap the not-so-powerfully-educated Chungs with a $54m suit ($67m originally) over the loss of his trousers. He elected to take their “Satisfaction Guaranteed” to a litigious extreme. Was his:

• a cold and calculated campaign one more typically associates with the military?
• an unseemly thing for an African-American to do to a Korean-American family, given the sad history of Blacks in America?
• an abuse of education’s promise to create “a population capable of bettering the rest of the world as well as ourselves”?

Your posts always give food for thought. Keep 'em coming.

Ken

I totally agree with the comment about Americans dont value education. I look at my six year old son and his first year of kindergarten. Children are sponges at that age and he attends a public inner city school. The school has only blacks and mexicans. He was speaking spanish words before the school year is out. The classroom education was not what he was absorbing. The bad behaviors of the student, teachers, and general workers inside the school were doing.

I wonder sometimes what my son has to look forward to when it is time for him to go to college. Will he find what he needs in this life that will make him happy. His purpose I pray everyday for him and my family. We are the family that is maybe two hundred dollars above the poverty line. Not elligible for help and not able to afford more. Which will cause us to think of "hustles" to make ends meet. Living paycheck to paycheck. My husband and I are both college graduates. He teaches special education. I am a personnel director. Together our income is less than $60,000 per year with three kids.

I believe the reason America is the way it is because now the prosperous dont care enough to help anymore. They are selfish and are only trying ways to make themselves richer.

So answer this how do you change the minds of the spoiled, stubborn, and small-minded?

Thank You Joan!

I'm so glad the Holy Spirit gives you the strength to continue to see and point out those things that are necessary for us to pay attention to, in order to improve our society as well as ourselves as human beings and brothers and sisters in GOD.

God Bless You Joan. And the Holy Spirit of God continues to write on the Tablets of your Heart.

And may the Spirit of Truth deliver us from the dead letters of daily SPIN, that divert us from "SEEING" the more important issues.

Corinthians2 3:4-11

The more we discover how much we are Loved by God, the more we want to do God's Will

Educational capacity and War expenditure constitute a trade off. Like other emmiserations due to the Bush War, the education and health impacts are enormous.

The National Priorities Project (http://www.nationalpriorities.org) tells us this in their June Report:

The cost to American taxpayers is $456 billion so far. If that money were spent locally, the following could have been provided:

- 5.7 million people could have been provided with health care coverage each year since the
war began; AND
- 1 million affordable housing units could have been built; AND
- 430,000 school teachers could have been hired since the war began; AND
- 4.7 million students could have received tuition and fees for four years at a state university.

Thank you Sister Joan! The failure of the system to reward teachers who instill the love of learning into the young minds of our youth, thus providing a fertile ground for the implanation and utilization of knowledge acquired, floods the populace with under educated and unskilled youth, who are unable to advance and take advantage of a more prosperous and porductive life.
This benifits the "Mega-Rich" and "Political Leaders" by furnishing an unskill labor force at a minimal cost, and making service in the military much more attactive! When eventually, this country is inundated with the failures, which we have created by our lack discernment and apathy, the indigent will be such a burden upon our system that it will collapse from within, taking everyone to an existance well below what we now call the poverty level. The Wealthy and the Political Leaders be included. As Sister Joan noted, We will relive the Collapse of Roman Empire by our apathy.
"One Who Goes With God is Never Lost!"

John V.S.A. Vaisvil

Sr. Joan has again voiced my concerns. I really appreciate all that you said starting with the paragraph "Maybe instead," etc. 4 last paragraphs. Our First Congregational Church is involved with helping to resettle women prisoners back into the community with mentors and financial and emotional support. As part of that committee, we invited our state legislators on the Judicial committees at the state level. The information presented was astounding in what the cost is to the tax payer for prisons and prisoners to be kept in prison. To build a prison it costs $100,000 for one bed and $30,000 per year for one bed to maintain. What a waist of money. What if that were spent in prevention programs as you stated in your last four paragraphs.

Along this topic of wealth unchecked, I would like to point to a recent event in Hartford CT. My Congregational Church, the United Church of Christ, (UCC) had its Synod in Hartford and Bill Moyers (of the PBS fame, Bill Moyers' Journal) was their keynote speaker along with Barack Obama, Democratic Presidential hopeful. They spoke to a gathering of 10,000 members. I was not aware that Rev. Moyers was a Baptist minister and has for the past 40 years been a member of the First Congregational Church in Long Island, thus a UCC member.

Bill Moyers is worth listening to on their on line site for the UCC synod. He is so honest about the issues we are facing as a nation and how the message of Jesus has been hijacked by the Religious Right. Anyway it was addressing the racist history of our founding fathers despite the inspiring words of our Declaration of Independence during the Enlightenment period and the astounding disparity of wealth for our citizens today and what the implications are for our democracy.

I appreciate the emails of Sr. Joan and "From where she stands" I am glad you have a voice in the public.

I appreciate the opportunity to express my thoughts on the message I just read. With God's help, I am committed to joining in my Church community and my local community to assist where I can to make a difference. I am grateful for the on line news worth reading and responding to.

Irene, Guilford CT

America claims to value education, but we send a very mixed message to students. I guarantee that more high school students (and their parents) know the name of the latest winner of American Idol than know the name of a single scientist. I guarantee that more high school graduates know the name of the star athlete(s) in their graduating class than know the name of their class valedictorian. I guarantee that Americans can name more billionaires than Supreme Court justices. I guarantee that more Americans can name a Super Bowl MVP than can name a Nobel Prize winner. And, everyone knows that the richest person in the world is a college dropout!

America judges success monetarily. We tell students that they should go to college so that they will earn more money. Shouldn't we tell students to go to college (or not) so that they can get a job that they will enjoy? Shouldn't we tell students to do what makes them satisfied even if they don't earn a lot of money? Statistics consistently show that there is a reverse correlation between wealth and happiness. I remember when tradespeople - machinists, electricians, plumbers, etc. - were treated with respect. Now, society assumes that they aren't smart enough to attend college. People who work with their hands instead of their minds are denigrated. More education is not the answer to every problem. Just ask the next college graduate you meet who asks you if "you want fries with that?"

It is no coincidence that cities with low graduation rates have large minority, inner-city populations. The reality of inner-city kids is that the wealthiest people they know are either pimps or drug dealers - or both. A high school dropout selling drugs can make more money in a year than the average college graduate. Given American society's focus on money, it's not surprising which choice many of them make. No one thinks that he/she will be arrested.

Another problem is that we expect teachers to be financial martyrs. A college graduate with a degree in science, engineering or computer science can often earn two to three times in his/her first year by going into the private sector instead of entering public education. And few of those that do go into teaching stay more than a few years - especially in inner-city schools.

The last problem I'll mention is that one of the reasons that school systems have high dropout rates is because they encourage low-performing students to drop out. It raises the grade average of the remaining students. This process was well-documented in Houston, but it undoubtededly occurs elsewhere.

For all of our noble rhetoric, Americans really don't value education. If we did, we wouldn't spend more on cosmetics than we do on higher education.