Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Why are families leaving St. Paul schools? It’s a mystery. Now that the staff member doing the survey has been let go, we may never find out.
Looking at the chart, there appears to be some overlap in causes since the percentages work out to 114% and even under Common Core math, that’s not a reasonable answer. But just looking at the top three responses, I think I detect a pattern.
40% said “We moved.” I wonder why they moved? Better job outside the district? Seems unlikely, the economy isn’t that robust. Maybe they moved to GET outside the district? But why would they do that? Who’d want to leave the vibrant diversity of Frogtown to live in monochrome, monoculture Woodbury?
36% said “the school was unsafe.” But St. Paul just adopted new discipline policies to let Children Whose Lives Matter run wild. That’ll cut down on reported discipline statistics which will be a big help, won’t it? After the news accounts of violence in the last two years and the “don’t-bother-to-catch-go-straight-to-release” policy in effect, why would families think schools would be unsafe?
30% said “child was harassed/bullied.” Well that’s just whining. All kids are harassed and bullied, especially kids with Privilege who deserve it. That’s no excuse to leave the school. Pulling your kids out of our school costs us pupil-day money and that’s a racist hate crime.
Yep, it’s a total mystery why parents are pulling their kids out of St. Paul schools. Luckily, there are paid consultants to offer possible suggestions, some cited in the article. More arts classes might help. Different languages, smaller class sizes, better special education. Maybe training, to teach parents not to expect so much from schools like order, discipline, learning.
I hope they figure it out soon. A child’s education is not an experiment you can do over if it fails the first time, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to avoid a life of misery. All those minds would be a terrible thing to waste on fantasy feel-good foolishness.
Joe Doakes
Joe’s got some good ideas…
…but when you combine a “one size fits all” model of education, combined with a system that is designed to provide sinecures for the ruling political class’s care and feeding much more than “educating” people (despite the best efforts of a lot of teachers), what do they expect?
Or, more importantly, what do they expect you to expect?
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