Published: March 8, 2000
We Need Radical Changes
in K-3 Schools
By Emory Curtis
The more I look at what is happening
with our children in public schools, the more I'm convinced that, as a
minimum, the country needs to rethink how to deliver K-3 education. The "one size fits all" approach that
is the bedrock of our public education system doesn't work, for us.
Way too many of our youngsters are
left behind in later grades because they didn't "learn to read"
by the third grade so they then could "read to learn" from fourth
grade on. Those behind their third grade counterparts are doomed to be
even farther behind at higher grades.
The ethnic make-up of top academic
achievers in the California graduating high school classes shows the result
of those early failures. My oldest
daughter, Sylvia, a University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) librarian,
is in a UCSB African American staff group that presses the school to get
more black students.
At one meeting the Admissions office
gave them the statistics on last year's California public high school
graduates with a breakdown of those who met the entrance requirements
(grades, courses and SAT score) of the University of California (UC) system. They were shocked.
Less than three out of one hundred
(625) black graduates from California public high schools met UC
entrance requirements and less than four out of a hundred (3,593) Hispanic
graduates were UC eligible.
About thirteen out of a hundred (16,976)
white high school graduates met the UC requirements. The Asian and Filipino
rate was by far the highest; about thirty out of a hundred (13,315) of
their public high school graduates met UC's admission requirements.
Those are tragic numbers, for us.
And don't blame racism. Racism may have a bit to do with that disparity,
but the lack of an educational achievement focus in our community has
a lot more to do with it. And when that "one size fits all"
educational approach in public schools is added, those two millstones
have a helluva lot more to do with our youngsters poor educational performance.
The education system needs to recognize
that the varability of its incoming product, kindergartners, is so wide
that different approaches must be used to have them about even at the
end of the third grade.
Many children walk (or skip) into kindergarten
counting and knowing their ABCs and shapes others will get their first
inkling about those concepts in kindergarten. Also many of those kids have never seen anyone in their home reading
for pleasure or information.
The need for action on that front is
about to be recognized by the Department of Education because of data
gathered from a 22,000 sample of youngsters who entered kindergarten in
1998. And, surprisingly (to them, I guess), they found that children from
low income homes start kindergarten in poorer health and not knowing their
numbers and letters as well as their richer counterparts.
Of the kindergartners whose exam scores
were in the top 25%, forty six out of one hundred had college graduate
mothers, sixteen out of one hundred had mothers who had just finished
high school, and a measly six out of one hundred of the top 25% scorers
had mothers who didn't finish high school. Those performance numbers still holds later
on in the education stream and on into the economic world where education
pays and a lack of education costs. Our public education system, by not
educating our youngsters, is not the leveling process for our youngsters
it should and can be.
A program that the University of Southern
California (USC) in Los Angeles started in 1991 shows that youngsters
whom the present system fails in elementary school can turn their life
around and achieve academic goals that had never entered their
or their parents minds, with the right help.
It is called the Neighborhood Academic
Initiative (NAI) because it's focus is on USC's low income multi-ethnic
neighborhood. Each year NAI selects
about 55 or 60 sixth grade students with a "C" or "B"
averages in the low performance Manual Arts High School feeder schools
around USC.
NAI staff starts working with the parent(s)
and the students before and after they attend their seventh grade classes
at their regular school. Social
workers are a key part of the staff support for the program. It pays off.
One academic year after being in the
program the average reading comprehension and math test scores of NAI
students more than doubled. Because
of the NAI program, in 1997 twenty of NAI Manual Arts High School graduates
entered USC by meeting its admission requirements in terms of grades and
SAT scores. That was more students than Manual Arts had sent to USC for
the prior ten years.
Over the past three years the program
has had 140 high school graduates. Two
thirds of them are in a four-year college or university, 63 are in USC,
36 are in Community College, 3 are in vocational school and only 8 are
not in some post-secondary education.
Those are impressive numbers for any
school. It's even more impressive for students whose family backgrounds
fits the four family situations the U. S. Department of Education labels
as putting pupils at risk for failing tests, repeating grades or dropping
out of school. Those factors are
parents who didn't finish high school, a single parent home, welfare dependency,
and a family that speaks a language other than English.
Only a very few NAI students came from
homes without any of those four family situations. It is not just luck
that they escaped the natural consequences of those negative family situations.
It is a direct result of a program that focused on student academic achievement
and put together the in-classroom and out-of-classroom elements needed
to make it real.
That's the focus and the flexibility
local schools need to level the ground for our students. It is not easy.
It is not cheap. But, it can and should be done.
Dr. Fleming, the brother who devised
and directed the program, was fought tooth and nail by the Los Angeles
Unified School District teachers and administrators.
In the end they won. Dr
James Fleming left the program at the end of this past year's.
Let me hear from you: (916)961-1859 (V); (916)961-1596 (FAX); e-mail; eccurtis@hotmail.com. or 8931 Bluff Lane, Fair Oaks, CA 95628.
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