Matthew Ladner has a short column, Missing the Mark(et), in which he builds on the two recent episodes on Oprah Winfrey. He focuses on one of the problems with public schools: "Why do some of our k-12 schools perform so shamefully? One reason is that unlike other services in the U.S., we have tragically divorced our schools from normal accountability mechanisms."
In Where Does the Buck Stop?, Arwynn Mattix points out that a recent U. D. District Court decision to make the schools give more money to English Language Learners (ELL) has no guarantee of success. The funding needs to be structured in such a way that the schools are motivated to help the children succeed.
And in The Silent Epidemic, Arwynn Mattix addresses the public school drop out crises. Currently almost a third of the students in the United States public schools drop out. The Gates Foundation did a study and Arwynn reports on one of the findings: "The overwhelming majority of participants said they might not have dropped out if their schools offered better instruction (81 percent) and fostered an academic climate (65 percent)."
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Technorati tags: Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, public schools, school reform
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