CommentsLAUSD EDUCATION - While some kids will succeed despite the purposeful, generational, and unaccountable incompetence of LAUSD's generational monkey business as usual,
the vast majority never recover from the vacuous rhetoric unsupported by pragmatic programs designed to address the actual subjective levels of the predominantly minority students who continue to be socially promoted year after year and consigned to failure by what remains this militantly ignorant purposefully misguided system of public non-education.
Education is time sensitive and inextricably linked to when the human brain is susceptible to learning certain specific skills. Once these windows are past, remediation becomes increasingly more difficult the longer the student is removed in time from when they should have learned the targeted skill in the first place. Ultimately, it becomes functionally impossible.
But this is not a popular reality, so students and parents continue to be lied to with unrealistic academic educational goals that in no way take into consideration the age and objective functioning level of the student in question. In short, LAUSD criminal malfeasance has clear and immutable negative consequences that will follow the student for the rest of their lives, while profoundly negatively impacting our society, which doesn't seem of much concern to those continuing to run public education into the ground. Not only will these students be incapable of entering into gainful employment, but they will cost disproportionate amounts for things like healthcare and incarceration, which ironically is dwarfed by what it would have cost to assure them a good and timely education in the first place. Yes, this form of blatant racism is irrational.
The hardest barrier to overcome in working to change this negative outcome is getting a student to allow themselves to be regressed into an educational zone where they are capable of being educated- given their subjective level. An environment where they trust and don't feel humiliated by the process. This can't be more difficult than the present system of public education which continues to assure the failure of the vast majority of students who are subjected to it.
While 70% of the students going to Los Angeles City College are taking remedial courses, because they were socially promoted through K-12 without these basic skills, there is no awareness or provision in these ersatz college courses to deal with these now adult students subjective levels and egos, which causes the vast majority to drop out before finishing the program or achieving any measurable level of remediation and subject mastery of these foundational skills necessary to attend and benefit from real college level courses. Again, regression to a level where the student is initially comfortable academically is the key, which is ignored by most remediation programs.
And it goes without saying that the earlier students can be regressed to their actual functioning level, the greater the chance that they will succeed in school, their dreams, and as assets in facing the complex issues this country must effectively address, if we intend to survive.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD.)
