Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): And finally tonight, we turn to our series on the high school dropout problem. Over the next 18 months, the NewsHour is joining with other public media to examine consequences and solutions. The series is called the American Graduate Project.
Last night, we invited more than 100 teachers to a town hall at 9 News Network, our PBS station in St. Louis, to talk about the challenges they face in the classroom.
Here's a small sample.
Key excerpts
WOMAN: .... But the problem is, they don't drop out in high school. They drop out in second grade, and they hang around for eight years.
MAN: These children are coming from homes where nobody understands what is positive. No one is educated. So we have a cycle of ignorance, one, two, three, four generations where people don't have the ability to read.
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GWEN IFILL: The question was, in your own experience as a teacher, would you say that the level of community support and involvement in your school is high, medium or low? Twenty-one percent of you said high; 24 percent said medium; 55 percent said low. Ouch.
Was that your sense, that there is not enough community engagement in our schools?
MAN: Well, I think there isn't.
And, certainly, we can influence both the kids and the community, if we're given that opportunity. And in this country today, what we're focusing on instead is, can you answer a multiple choice test, instead of, how do we make you love education? How do we get you to feel that this is something that is meaningful to you? And if we don't do that, the rest of this is a waste of time.
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