• Front page
• Receive letters on your RSS reader

Jennifer Draper Carson of Denver writes:

I just returned from a week of blissful vacation to read of the CSAP scores and fallout. I spent a large part of my day aghast and saddened at the scores that had maintained or more likely dropped since last year. I wondered why am enrolling my son Henry in one of the lowest performing schools in my district.
Later this evening I wondered about who set expectations that Superintendent Bennet could salvage a deeply damaged system in one year?
I began to think instead about all the dedicated parents, teachers, students, staff, and administrators I know who make up DPS. And the business leaders and graduates of DPS who are so committed to our communities. I would ask that parents of young children not give up on the goal of having their child be well-educated in the Denver public school system.
Rather than relying on one number, please go and visit your local schools.
Please call your principals. Please attend a Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or Collaborative School Committee (CSC) meeting. Please visit www.aplusdenver.org and understand what your fellow citizens are doing to ensure that Denver’s urban school system becomes the best in the nation.
Please join the effort to save the strongest bastion of equal opportunity that exists on our country today - public education. Take heart in the fact that many people, volunteer and paid, are working their tails off to ensure that Denver’s public schools will be the best in the nation.
It will not take one year. It will take many years, and many of us as dedicated participants - parents, volunteers, students, teachers, business partners - to turn the course of the ship. Rather than lambasting those in charge, let us work together to help the course improve. If our children need additional hours of schooling, volunteer to get them the tutoring they need. Work with the union to understand why the school year and day can’t be longer, to give our children the additional hours of schooling they so desperately need. View this as a problem we can affect vs. one we cannot affect. This is our community. These are our children. Denver is our city, and our economy.
It will take time. It will take all of us. We can do it, and we owe it to our children.

This letter has not been edited.

READER COMMENTS

Or, if this were a truly sane country, you could take your child to a school of your choice. You could take them to a Montessori school, or whatever one you might like. You could home school them. Why do you insist on letting the .gov force your child into a failing system? Why do you not revolt and take charge of their futures?

Naw, too easy to just let the .gov warehouse them and beg for more tax dollars....

Hey Dravur, you CAN take them to any school you choose! Of course, you will have to pay for it. Shut up and put your money where your whining drivel comes out.

Put an ICE agent in the schools. Watch CSAP scores soar and discipline problems plunge.

How about taking the political adgenda out of the schools. making the teachers responsible as well as the administration for educating not brainwashing. Go back to the basics. No more assine political correctness.
Just good ol book learning.

A novel idea i know

Jennifer,
Involvement in education is very important. Improvement is quite possible but how long will it take? I graduated in 1969 and the fluff classes had already started to replace academics. The decline in basics upon which a well rounded education is built was also underway. Many thought that if we gave the students the "full spectrum of knowledge" each child would "bloom into a perfect individual" and the basics would flow naturally. That was the theory. Today we reap the crop of ignorance such foolishness sowed.
Biggest problem is that while we labor to save the school system we lose the students. Year after year we fail to give them the tools they need to learn. At graduation, we tell them to go out and build their lives with an empty tool box.
Children can't stop growing while we fix things. We have to take care of those already here by adopting systems, models and curricula that are proven to succeed. Today we do not do that in most of the public schools. Pick your villan: underfunding, incompetent teachers, uninvolved parents, broken families, greedy teacher's unions or rampant political interference. Doesn't matter who's at fault. Those kids are the ones being punished.

Thanks, Jennifer, for your wise and heart-felt message. So much healthier than just announcing what the problems are. While you won't see it from the responses, hopefully there are readers who will take you seriously. Thanks again.

Well, Jennifer Draper Carson, I'm glad you had a "blissful vacation". But, it seems the point of your letter is that you are worried about how other people will educate your child. Here's an off-the-wall, old-fashioned, wild idea: Educate your kids yourself. Because, it is your family and Henry is your child.
It will take time. It will take your whole family. You can do it, and you owe it to your children. Regrettably, you may have to give up your blissful vacations for awhile.

Did you think taking a blissful vacation was going to change the public school system?

The problem with the public school system is the flavor of the year new and improved programs and they are using our children as guinea pigs.

When that program doesn't work the choose another that is the for sure going to solve all their problems.

Their are 3 programs that the public schools don't teach but have given the best results in scores and getting even slow learners to succeed.

They are,Phonics for reading,Core Knowledge Curriculum,and Saxon Math.

The schools don't want use programs that actually work and get results, Why?

They will have to admit all these years have been wasted and the have been wrong.

08:44 said ” How about taking the political adgenda out of the schools. making the teachers responsible as well as the administration for educating not brainwashing. “

I am curious as to what “political agenda” you had in mind, but it certainly sounds like a good idea.

” Go back to the basics”

Like spending more time on mathematics, science, and biology, instead of so much on band practice, football practice, and basketball practice?
Like attending science fairs rather than away games, and buying lab equipment instead of football fields and sports equipment?

” No more assine political correctness”

Like teaching evolution properly for a change and not being PC about it to satisfy the religious sensitivities of some?

JohnII said ”Here's an off-the-wall, old-fashioned, wild idea: Educate your kids yourself.”

JohnII, my calculus is a bit rusty, so do you think I should get myself back up to scratch or would it be better to get somebody else to do it so I can focus on my career and keep the money coming in? I was never much good at art, so should I just do my best and give the kids crappy art tuition?

Or I could outsource the teaching to somebody else who specializes in teaching that subject and teaching as a skill in itself. I do that all the time in business, outsourcing things that aren’t the company’s core competency, and accepting work from customers that they outsource to us.

After all, why make the assumption that the average parent makes a better teacher than the average teacher is?

Mr. Skank,

Of course, there's nothing wrong with hiring a third party for educational purposes. But, why is that something I need to hear about?

If you want to brush up on calculus, go ahead and do it. Hire a tutor. Knock yourself out. And if the tutor does a poor job, go ahead and feel free to let people know that this particular tutor's services are not worth his price.

But, don't give me a speech about how I need to help make your tutor a better tutor. That's between you, calculus and your tutor. None of my business.

Now, you'll probably counter with the argument that the benefits to society as a whole from education make it my personal business to worry about everyone else's education. And you'd be right.

I believe the best way to ensure an effective educational system is to keep the teacher/parent/student ambit as tight as possible. Jennifer Draper Carson would get much better results by talking with her child's tutor (or teaching her child herself) than by writing a letter to a newspaper to be read by strangers.

I spent yesterday afternoon teaching my niece the finer aspects of playing softball. If I failed as teacher, should she write a letter to the newspaper asking strangers to help me be a better teacher? Or should she tell her mom to fire Uncle John II.

JohnII, well as a country we already did outsource the job, and the employers and parents effectively decided on standards, and the whole shebang was created as national education. So you and I inherit this system based on a contractarian view of public goods, whether we individually agreed to it or not.
Same holds for all manner of other social goods.

You can opt out of paying the bill for public education by either getting enough people to overturn the original contract, or by simply leaving the society.

As you said, we can have a different discussion based on utilitarian reasons for maintaining or changing the existing school system, but Ms. Draper-Carson is quite right to complain if the education system doesn’t comply with the original contractarian commitment.

You may of course disagree with her reading of the implied contract itself, since it probably was simply to give basic literacy and not deliver all the extra bits that have no doubt accreted over time.

Good points, Mr. Skank. As far as opting out of the system, I believe that is already happening. Most Denver residents send their kids to either a private school or a school outside the district. The DPS is quickly becoming irrelevant.

Sure, Ms. Draper-Carson can write to the newspaper about whatever she wants. But, as for this letter, I think she'd get the same results if she just wrote strictly about her "blissful vacation".

>

Are you kidding me? Who would these residents be? The affluent and mostly white residents? In my SE Denver neighborhood, 90% of children are sent to DPS schools. They don't go to the neighborhood school though...they choice in to a variety of other DPS schools that suit the parents/child better.

No need for blanket statements about what "most" Denver residents do...

I am so glad you wrote this letter I believe that we can all make a difference if we can work together to make this one community. It seems that there are many separate groups in Denver and we all want to point fingers at one another. This is not how to make changes happen in the school. By standing up together and letting all of our children and the school distric know we support them by volunteering our time we can make a difference. We as adults can talk and blow hot air but don't stop there be a positive presence in the schools help all you can. I do and many students as well as staff appreciate it and continue to pass it on by doing what they can for our community!

POST A COMMENT

• 'Kid Nation' reality show a new low
• Rivers a shameful hire
• Too little news
• ‘Diesel’ fumes
• Unlocalized story a disservice to readers
• Riled up by Christian music
• Darling of the left
• Solutions too costly