By: Joel Price

Joel Price — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:40:03 +0000

Whether it is an inner-city child in Pasadena or a rural child in the Midwest the realities are the same. Single-parent families, poverty, lack of access to proper medical care, no organized and funded pre-K program all lead to the same thing; a child that cannot learn or compete in a 21st Century economy.
The facts are clear and the statistics are stark. A child that starts out behind the curve and cannot read at grade level by 3rd grade will, in all probability, never catch up even with intensive remediation. Since reading comprehension, vocabulary and content fluency is fundamental to all subjects a child that lags behind at a young age never catches up. What then happens is a growing disenchantment with the formal educational system and a higher than normal failure rate. This leads to dropouts, drug abuse, crime and incarceration.
Politicians, for the most part, do not understand this quotient since they came from relatively stable environments and fit into society well. The kids that slip through the cracks, and these cracks are well documented, are lost through indifference rather than through outright neglect although that cannot be discounted in all cases.
Society, and politicians, must engage their brains before they run their mouths. A dollar spent on education is not a loss to a state it is, in fact, a downpayment on the future. If the US is to compete economically in the 21st Century the country needs all of its intellectual power harnessed to the wheel.
Currently China has more Honor Roll (B or better average) students than the US has total students. If we took every job currently held in the US and sent them to China the country could absorb all of them and not have any problems at all.
The federal education law is up for review this year. The President has spoken often about education and his Secretary of Ed is out on the lecture circuit talking about a “Race to the Top”. If American education is in a race then maybe we’d better lace up our sneakers, take a deep breath and get running. If we don’t the rest of the world will look upon us as a failed experiment and a once proud and highly educated nation will fall into despair and ruin.
If not now when? If not us whom?
.-= Joel Price´s last blog ..WS: Trip to FeilongShan =-.

Comments on: Plugging Pasadena’s School-to-Prison Pipeline

By: Joel Price