a paragraph a day

I’m reading “Will College Pay Off” by Peter Cappelli which leads to an examination of the K-12 schools and how well they are preparing our young for life after high school graduation. The federal government National Assessment of Educational Progress provides an annual report card of how we’re doing as a nation as well as how individual states are doing. It turns out that Massachusetts is doing the best in the country, which begs the question, why are its schools so much better?

In short, Massachusetts uses a strategy of increased funding, paying attention to the under performers, longer school days, higher expectations of teachers, holding graduating students accountable (either an acceptance letter from a college or a job offer on company letterhead before they graduate), and covering the basics (students in vocational schools are expected to write about their daily activities.)

Obviously increasing funding for the Kansas school system is beyond my solitary capabilities so I'll focus on the basics: incremental increase in learning time and writing. Based on this I'll model behavior that I hope my children and their children will adopt: 

Write at least a paragraph every day

In Massachusetts schools they write essays. This is a hard task for most people and therefore counterproductive. What is do-able for me is a 15 minute writing session with the goal of 1 paragraph that I could enter in a journal, on a scrap of paper I put in a file folder, or on a social media app. If I can’t think of something impromptu to write about, here are two websites to get me started:

12 Things to Write About When You’re Fresh Out of Ideas grammarly.com

Interesting Topics to Write About journalbuddies.com

. . . and if I feel like a story:

Top 100 Short Story Ideas thewritepractice.com

Lastly, here is an excerpt from the article about why Massachusetts’ schools are 'so much better':

“I’ve always praised Massachusetts for their work on education, but they never want to be praised. They want to know where they’re weak,” he said. “K-12 education is supposed to prepare people to go to college, and a 78 percent graduation rate in Washington state — even though you thump your chest and feel good about your quality of life — means 22 percent of kids are immediately going to the very tail end of the labor-market queue, to the jobs no one else wants — if they get jobs at all.”

That was precisely the fate of 21 percent of students at Worcester Tech when Sheila Harrity, who had never set foot in a vocational school, took the reins when the new building opened in 2006.

Task No. 1: Double the number of honors courses and open them to all.

“What are you doing to our school?” her teachers shrieked. “These are not academic kids!”

A former college basketball star with a straight-shooting style, Harrity next took a hard look at test results. Forty percent of Worcester Tech students were scoring zeros on the written portion of the MCAS, she said. So Harrity imported teacher-trainers to address this. In every classroom, from home construction to hair-coloring, kids were taught to write essays in response to exam questions.

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