I teach medical science and biotechnology in a health sciences academy attached to a large high school just down the river from the Pentagon. I’m in my 14th year in a district which not too many years ago was ranked nationally at or near the top depending on whose list you looked at. There is no lack of exposure to military accession in my school or the rest of the district.
We receive students from eight high schools from the side of the county with more immigrants and lower socioeconomic status. My classes are 95 percent non-white. These kids have kept me employed all these years and I’ve developed a trust and reputation with them as a teacher who’ll treat them right, teach them something, and write recommendation letters for college and other post-secondary programs.
Few of my minority students through the years have had any interest in military service of any kind, and the majority were not/are not qualified for officer programs or enlisted for that matter. Pre-pandemic the military recruiters set up in the cafeteria once a month and the last time I spoke with the Marines they said they were having trouble meeting mission because “kids are fat dumb and lazy.“ Most of my students work hard and have big dreams. Most of them every year say they want to go to medical school but the truth is, they don’t have the academic background or family and societal support to get in.
My wife and I spent yesterday watching our grandsons’ baseball games. I asked my daughter if she heard the state is taking away advanced diplomas and further neutering the curriculum. She erupted before I got out all of my question. She not only worked hard to earn her IB diploma but moved to their current neighborhood for the great schools. Unfortunately, coming soon to a great school near you are lowered standards and students from “failing schools.”
Narrowing the achievement gap was the buzz phrase a couple years ago and now it is equity. I’m a huge fan of equity and am a faithful practitioner. The problem with putting lower performing students with the high flyers is the teacher can only go as fast as the slowest student. Meanwhile the higher performers are not getting what they need to keep moving. Or, if we meet the needs of the high performers, the slower kids suffer. The solution is not spoken about in public. The solution surely can’t be implemented because the political environment has administrators and governors and presidents yielding to the pressures of the day.
Meanwhile, students are fleeing to private schools, home schooling, and deeper into the suburbs. That leaves once high performing schools with the dreaded “failing schools” label which perpetuates the problem with the solution being to mix up the students and re-boundary the county. When administrators and politicians speak of minorities they should tell us which minorities and admit to us how their policies have created this lack of minority representation in service academies.
abcnews.go.com
