Defund the DPS!

[pffft]

p.s. I don't think all kids are destined for college, necessarily. But that's only if they get a decent high school education and come out of it well versed in the basic four that you mention. Today, you can't say that. The top students, like you, do well, but what about the 95% below you?
They have to be made to understand that literacy, basic math skills etc. are something we all need in life.

[mwilbert]

MWilbert, who is ideologically opposed to my points of view.

This may be true, but actually I strongly support public schools, and am not particularly fond of voucher-type approaches--they might be OK if properly funded, but as generally proposed they just subsidize the well-off while not giving the needier enough to get a good education. There are also serious problems with mechanisms to allocate adequate funds to children with exceptional requirements. However, in my view the DPS is sui generis both because of its unusual record of non-accomplishment and because of the key role it has played in the desertion of the city by middle-class families. Also, there aren't enough well-off families with children in the DPS to worry too much about over-subsidizing them.

As far as I can see, I am in broad agreement with English on the kind of educational approaches that need to be taken--we just disagree about whether those approaches would best be implemented within the DPS structure, and how successful we could expect such initiatives to be, inside or outside of that structure.

[mwilbert]

For people who are interested in the problem of setting up schools that do a good job of serving disadvantaged kids, I just saw a discussion of whether we know how to do that at:

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/12/09/...beat-the-odds/

[English]

Thanks, MWilbert, for the link! I'll look it over this weekend...