The Bronx might seem an improbable setting for an academic miracle with an area of 42 square miles with 1,472,654 residents.
I'm a university professor here, the ninth-most-populous in the U.S., where crimes are common. Yet the latest data shows graduation rates at the city’s schools are surging. Alas, such gains are not showing up in other academic indicators. However, I have lectured on the West Coast, the Midwest, the South, and the northeastern American states.
The problem as I see it is that the US is obsessed with numbers, especially in education. America wants more people to graduate high school and fewer dropouts. So when graduation numbers rise, politicians are happy and praise the public school system that produced the better numbers. What they don't do, but should do, is look behind those numbers to see if they represent a house of cards.
Unfortunately, this failure to look behind the numbers and to only look at the statistics results in the kind of failed education policies that Florida and Texas, among other states albeit mainly Republican states, implement and embrace.
America needs to change and look behind the numbers. In my view, the heart of the matter is the failure to teach public speaking, logic, communication, and philosophy beginning in elementary school and throughout all years.
Thinking, along with reading and writing are the skillsets that make learning of every subject possible. But regardless of how our education failures are tackled, it needs to be dealt with now or we will regret it for many years. I am trying to do my part and I hope others will turn it into a national battlecry..
More employers are cutting 4-year college degree job requirements, but who is getting hired?
The movement away from degree prerequisite is growing, but there's more to it than meets the eye.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-employers-are-cutting-4-year-colleg…