I saw the following Boston Globe article highlighted in the Public Education Network’s “Weekly NewsBlast”. The item, titled “English-only instruction rule doubles the dropout rate” with the synopsis given as follows…

A new report profiled in The Boston Globe has found that in the wake of a voter-approved law change six years ago that requires all students be taught in English, the high school dropout rate has nearly doubled for English language learners in Boston. The study, from the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts and analyzed data between 2003 and 2006, and portrays a school system ill-prepared to serve nonnative English speakers, about 38 percent of the Boston’s 56,000 students. In many cases, the district fails to evaluate properly and subsequently identify hundreds of students for special language instruction, and doesn’t give parents information on program options. Overall, the data show that the law, intended to accelerate English fluency, hasn’t helped English language learners to catch up with their English-speaking peers, in many cases leaving them further behind. Carol R. Johnson, superintendent of Boston schools, said the district will revamp the way it tests students for services, expand programs, and provide more comprehensive information to parents. “I think everybody recognizes we need to move with a sense of urgency,” she said. “Children need help and we need to help them now.”

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I continue with my unschooling theme and my quest to convince people who are skeptical that this is a valid learning path for some as an alternative primary educational “engine” to formal schooling. Just to recap, our son Eric left school in the middle of eighth grade and our daughter Emma after ninth. Eric has had no “formal” schooling since then. Emma has taken several French courses at community college along with a six-week French language immersion school in Montreal, Canada. The many things they have learned since then have been in the context of “real life” and some tutors that Emma has hooked up with along the way to help her learn dance, piano, art, and now continue her study of French.

Anyway… on with the post! (more…)

The ABCs I’m talking about are agency, balance and context…

I think these are three important concepts as our society moves forward in uncharted waters. Important for everybody, but particularly for our youth, who as the years pass will more and more have to steer the ship of our culture. But first that ever-needed context…

I think our American culture has lost its bearings… and for good reason too. We humans are dynamic and powerful consciousnesses (more so than many of us may know) with a great ability to adjust quickly and profoundly to new circumstances, at least in a timeframe of centuries, but even in the course of a lifetime. I think this is a blessing, but the roller coaster ride it puts humans and our culture through can involved a mind-boggling and nerve-wracking amount of change and adjustment. (more…)

Our son Eric always had trouble getting to sleep at night. And starting at age three when he had to get up early to go off to pre-school and later regular school, the issue of getting him to bed and from there to sleep was always a daily challenge. His mind would race and he would resist letting go of the day. His sister Emma, three years younger but with just as active a mind, was right there with him, and in need of some sort of serious transition to get to sleep at night. (more…)

Besides posting my blog entries here on my very own blog, I also post them on Daily KOS, a progressive political blog site. What is great about Daily KOS is that I get a great deal of responses to my posts which is always great when you are writing and also exposes me to other wisdom that expands my own thinking.

I got over 200 comments to my Daily KOS post yesterday on “College… The New High School” (though many were responses to other responses and not to my original post.) If you want to see my “diary” on Daily KOS, including all the responses I get, click here.

Here are bits from some of the many great heartfelt and provocative comments. I am taking the liberty to excerpt several of them (hopefully not too badly out of context) and comment further to try and keep this discussion stoked. (more…)

I’ve seen a position put forward by people in the Obama administration and others attempting to anticipate the future of education in America that, just as 30 years ago it was important that all youth graduated from high school to find a reasonably good job, today it is equally important that all youth graduate from some sort of two or four year college program to achieve a similar work readiness in today’s world.

On the one hand, since more and more jobs seem to require computer and other technical skills, and society in general seems to be getting more complex, it seems pretty obvious there is truth to this position. Like it or not… everyone now needs fourteen to sixteen years of mandatory education. If you throw in kindergarten, which is pretty universally attended these days, we are talking about fifteen to seventeen years. And what about pre-school, and all the efforts around the country to make available (or even require) universal pre-school attendance for all kids prior to kindergarten? Let’s tack on another year to that requirement. (more…)

When Eric was ten and Emma was seven, as part of their bedtime routine, I read my kids Isaac Asimov’s seven book sci-fi classic, a story of one person and one cybernetic being’s impact on events across many worlds and lifetimes.

The narrative epic begins in the first two books with the story of the mathematician Harry Seldon, and his development of “Scientific History”, by which he could somehow predict and put things in motion to ensure the continuation of advanced human civilization in the wake of the decadence and deterioration of the current galactic human empire that Harry and the other characters of the book are living in. The rest of the story plays out in the final five books to show how well (or not) the institutions and artifacts Seldon created preserve human civilization through the next tumultuous five-hundred years of galactic human history. (more…)

Cats, unfortunately, do not live as long as most of us humans do. So if you are a family that has cats, odds are you will experience the death of one. For my kids, it was a memorable experience, but first some context…

I grew up with cats in the house. In 1965, when I was ten we got our first one, a big black un-fixed male we called “Midnight”. He would go out for days and come back with part of his ear chewed off and an oozing wound just below that ear. Since he was big and powerful he probably gave worse than he got to the other cat. But he was still our kitty and we were his human companions.

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