The Sunday Education Weekly Reader: 11.27.11

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 11.27.11. This week's roundup:

• The readers know more about what's wrong with Kansas City, MO public schools than the editorial board.
• When do you think graphic sexual education curriculum will appear in US classrooms for students as young as eight years old?
• A lesson on how immigrants were taught to become Americans and still hold onto their religious identity.
• Question: How did the US EVER become a super power and send men to the moon without an overbearing educational nanny state?
  

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The Kansas City Star editorializes about what Kansas City can do to encourage schools to become functional and not failing. As usual, a commenter sheds light on the problem more succinctly than the editorial board and with common sense:

Hiddy-ho, here we go - The school board is pointless because it doesn’t really matter who is on the board, the results will be the same – failure. To achieve success, the community needs to come to the realization that about 90 per cent of pupils who attend school in the Kansas City School District aren’t college material. Once the education program in the Kansas City is restructured away from college prep and toward training students to be employable in the trades and service industries, we might then began to see the beginnings of a successful school district. There is an old saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.” However, a pigskin coin purse might be possible.

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Graphic sexual education curriculum is present in UK schools for eight year old students and the parents aren't happy about it. From a parent who withdrew her child from the school showing the DVD:

‘The original letter from the school led me to believe that it (the DVD) was just about puberty,’ she said. ‘The title was not given so we couldn’t even look it up online. I couldn’t make the viewing parents were invited to, but I didn’t think I had any reason to be concerned.

‘The first I knew about its content was when I heard my daughter and her friend discussing it on the way home in the car. It caused such a stir. There were reports of some boys copying what they saw and jumping on girls after school.


With the push for international curriculum, it may very well be in US classrooms in the very near future. How does this type of curriculum make ANY student STEM ready and "globally competitive"?

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This is a touching story on how a teacher taught young Jewish students in Hebrew Academy how to assume an American cultural identity while still retaining their religious heritage.

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According to this author, the US government MUST become involved in the educational lives of INFANTS if the country is to become educationally competitive:

If we could fix things from birth to age four or five, reading scores in third grade would take care of themselves–there wouldn't be an American epidemic of reading failure in grade three.

Is this the role of US government? Whatever happened to the role of parents in their children's lives? And how can the government "fix things" for a child at birth? What "things" need to be "fixed"? Isn't the child's well-being a parent's responsibility vs the government's?

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Educational thought for the week:

"Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company". --George Washington from Rules of Civility