The increasing students with poor academic performance or discipline problems are giving headache to Austin school district. The school district is paying a price for the at-risk students who mostly end up dropping out. Many school principals urged the district to outsource those at-risk students to a private company.
Sending out the at-risk students to a place would definitely make school environment into a better place. Those who always cause troubles would not distract the others. But what would happen if those who do not study stay together? They tend to not study at all. This will result in the same as they drop out. In my opinion, the goal of education is to bring out the full potential of the students. We are going to pay for trapping the students into a place without educating them.
On the other hand, if the school district decides to keep the at-risk students it will probably have to increase the spending on them as their problems get bigger. But it is worth to do so. The school must have more hard working students. It already has a good environment that might have affect on them. It is more possible to change them from dropping out comparing sending them to a place with no help. Moreover, private company is not a non-profit organization. It will probably cost more to the school district. As we see, sending the at-risk students to a private company is not a solution. It will have a worse consequence.
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I agree with you that the Austin school district should not sent their at-risk students to a private company for help. I see this as completely discouraging for the students even though they may not care about education at all. If a student was already told they are on thin ice at their school and then finds out they have to go somewhere else to get additional help, I'm sure that will not play well with their self-confidence.
ReplyDeleteThe only way I would be on board with this proposal is if these private companies that are to take care of these students are hired to not only educate these students, but also to find the cause of their behaviors.
Regardless of the students attending a public or private institution, they are in need of motivation. I hope the Austin school district can provide this with things such as job fairs, job shadowing, technology incentives for the students and their families who may feel like they cannot keep up with growing technology trends that may put them at a disadvantage. Stop calling these students "at-risk" and give provide them with help instead of alienating them to another building away from the "good" students.
After reading this blog about AISD possibly outsourcing at-risk students to a “private company”, I agree with the author, Yu Ching Chiu, that this could create further problems for these students. I believe the author made several good arguments in defending the need for these kids to remain in the AISD schools as opposed to being sent to an independent, private school. However, I don’t feel that there was enough information given in the original news article that this was taken from, to give a good argument. In other words, it seems like we’re missing information here. Such as, what is a “private company”? Where would the money come from to fund this institution? What kind of students are being considered “at-risk”? Those with learning disabilities? Or, those who are constantly getting into trouble? It seems hard to make a good argument without this information. Assuming we are referring to “troubled” students, I agree that sending these troubled students to a separate facility would be good for those not considered to be at-risk, but I feel that we would be doing a disservice to those at-risk who would attend this separate school. Truthfully, I don’t really know what the solution should be for this situation. Sure, the kids that put forth the effort to do well in school and prepare for college don’t want to be disrupted by those who choose to cause trouble. So yes, this does interfere, somewhat, with their education. On the other hand, shipping all of the “bad kids” to a facility that is known for schooling “bad kids” probably wouldn’t encourage them to do well in school and try to turn themselves around. In my opinion, it would encourage them to give up and just settle for the lifestyle they have chosen rather than give them a reason to want to change. Most of them have chosen their paths because they don’t have any motivation to want to do better for themselves and grouping them together in one facility labeled the “bad kid school” certainly wouldn’t change their attitudes.
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