Let’s put aside the horse race for the day and talk about schools. The two candidates haven’t done enough talking about schools, though one is clearly rougher than the other. So, let’s do the heavy lifting for those guys. Scanning through Bloglines, I came across two blog posts on education that deserve more attention.

GeekyMom finds it very frustrating that she and her husband can’t give the attention to her son’s homework that the school expects. When they get back from work, they are just frantically trying to get dinner made and decompress after a long day. As I’m sizing up my options for next year, this is a HUGE concern for me. Homework takes a lot of time and I can’t delegate that job to a babysitter.

GeekyMom thinks that schools need to do a better job accomodating families with two working parents. "I get frustrated at times because I feel like two-income families are
in a real bind when it comes to getting kids through school
successfully."

Dan Drezner points to an article in the Boston Globe, by Jay Mathews, which explains that studies that find American kids lagging behind kids in other countries are faulty. They are comparing apples and oranges. Kids are tracked in other countries, so the kids who are shunted to vocational schools aren’t included in national test scores. In the US, all kids are tested, even though who haven’t been exposed to calculus.

That seems to be a fair complaint with international comparisons of education, but it brings me to another concern that I’ve had lately — what happens to kids who aren’t on the professional track.

It’s part of the tradition in the US that kids aren’t tracked into professional and vocational tracks. Everybody attends the same schools. Early test scores don’t sort the kids out into various types of education. Late bloomers have the chance to prove themselves later in their academic career. All types, future doctors and future plumbers, hang out at the same lunch table and ogle the same girls. That’s a good thing.

However, we’re doing a lousy job taking care of the future plumbers. They get the worse teachers and are stigmatized by not taking calc or honors English. They aren’t getting the career counseling that they need. Especially, the girls, whose options for future employment are much worse than options for the guys. They are being shuttled into jobs as daycare workers and classroom aides. These jobs are extremely low paid and unstable.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with twin high school girls, who are unofficially in a vocational track and they had no idea what to do after high school. The guys in their class were future contractors and plumbers, jobs which can support a family. The girls were at a dead end. I suggested looking at being a hospital technician. Those EKG readers do very well.

These two problems with schools are on my mind this morning. Give me a couple more minutes and a shot of something stronger than my coffee, I could do more.

Your turn. What’s pissing you off about schools this morning. One per person.