Fixing the schools

I read in the san diego union tribune today that a school district in Georgia is going single-sex. They want to separate all the boys and all the girls in order to improve test scores (by improving the student's ability to learn, presumably). The superintendent of the district said this was the last thing he could think to do after trying everything else for the past 7 years to increase the scores (to get more funding via the no-child-left-behind act). He claims that the biggest problems include underage pregnancy, and suspects that this should help fix it.

I don't know that literature on sociological studies on single sex schools and their increased or decreased test scores so I can't say for sure whether separating the boys and girls is going to have the desired effect. But when I read the article I got depressed because this is just one example of school districts totally missing the point.

I feel incredibly confident that the problem is this: Parents depend on their schools to educate their children. This leads to the idea that the school is solely responsible for educating them. Parents are removed from the equation by both the school district as well as the parents themselves. It should, of course, be the other way around. Parents should be responsible for their children's education and the school is supposed to help the parents educate their children.

And that's the fundamental problem of the 'no-child-left-behind act'. It holds the schools responsible regardless of what the parents are doing. The reason why so many of our schools are not producing results is because the vast majority of parents don't care what the child is doing in school, don't have time to care, don't realize that they should care, feel inadequate to care because their own education was so shitty, as a result they don't instill into the child any sense of urgency, pride, respect, or desire for academic achievement and this results in schools becoming day-time detention centers.