Tag Archives: High School

News

Homeschooled sixteen-year-old graduates college and high school in the same week

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ABC News:

CBS News:

CBS local news reports on this amazing story.

Full text:

It’s that time of year when students all across the country will be celebrating high school and college graduations. One South Florida girl will get a diploma from both in the same week and she is only 16-years old.

Grace Bush already has her bachelor’s degree from college but she doesn’t have a high school diploma yet.

“It’s kind of weird that I graduated college before high school,” said Grace Bush.

The teen from Hollywood earned her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice Friday morning from Florida Atlantic University.

She did it with a 3.8 grade point average and completed the four-year degree in just three years.

“I started when I was 13 at Broward College and I also took my classes throughout the summer, so I was able to finish it before four years,” said Grace Bush.

The institution’s dual enrollment program allows high performing high school students to earn credit for the same courses towards their college degree and save thousands of dollars in tuition at the same time.

Grace’s parents wanted their nine children to earn college credit in high school because they can’t afford to send all of their kids to college. Their mother, who home schooled all the kids knew early on, Grace had a knack for learning.

“At two years old, she was already reading and I was totally shocked,” said Grace’s mother, Gisla Bush.

Grace is the third oldest in the Bush family.

“My two older sisters are doing it and I’m the third to do it. My oldest sister already graduated and my second oldest sister is graduating in the summer,” said Grace Bush.

The new college graduate said she’ll be pursuing a master’s degree this fall, and then going to law school.

“I would eventually like to become chief justice of the United States,” said Grace Bush.

During her spare time she plays the flute in two orchestras and that keeps her busy but she says she will finally take a little break during the summer.

“To study for the LSAT, so I can get as high a score as possible, so hopefully I can get a full ride into a good school, law school,” said Grace Bush.

Looking at the two videos above, I saw several interesting things. This young lady did not attend public school, she was home-schooled. She had a father who was proud of her and believed in her, which affects the graduation rates of children according to a recent study. She was filmed speaking in her home in front of a little plaque with a verse from the Bible.

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Polemics

New study: Teens with involved fathers more likely to graduate from college

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Here’s an article by W. Bradford Wilcox from the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Family scholars from sociologist Sara McLanahan to psychologist Ross Parke have long observed that fathers typically play an important role in advancing the welfare of their children.[2] Focusing on the impact of family structure, McLanahan has found that, compared to children from single-parent homes, children who live with both their mother and father have significantly lower rates of nonmarital childbearing and incarceration and higher rates of high school and college graduation.[3] Examining the extent and style of paternal involvement, Parke notes, for instance, that engaged fathers play an important role in “helping sons and daughters achieve independent and distinct identities” and that this independence often translates into educational and occupational success.[4]

Likewise, a US Department of Education study found that among children living with both biological parents, those with highly involved fathers were 42 percent more likely to earn As and 33 percent less likely to be held back a year in school than children whose dads had low levels of involvement.[5] But little research has examined the association between paternal involvement per se and college graduation.

I investigated that association by using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents who were in grades 7–12 in the 1994–95 school year.[6] The Add Health data indicate that young adults who had involved fathers when they were in high school are significantly more likely to graduate from college.

[…]Compared to teens who reported that their fathers were not involved, teens with involved fathers were 98 percent more likely to graduate from college, and teens with very involved fathers were 105 percent more likely to graduate from college (see figure 1, which adjusts for socioeconomic background).[7] Clearly, young women and men with more engaged fathers are more likely to acquire a college diploma than their peers without such a father.

I would think that fathers are helpful for keeping children out of trouble, warning them away from threats, helping them to do their homework and get jobs, and showing them the value of work and frugality. I think that in general, fathers have a concern that their children will not be able to provide for themselves and will starve. They tend to try to push their kids into harder subject areas that pay more, instead of letting the kids decide what makes them happy. And it’s good for kids that fathers do those roles – it makes a difference.

Polemics

Is public school a viable option for Christian parents?

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A couple of quick anecdotes from Yahoo News first, then we’ll see the numbers.

Excerpt:

Take the case of Petrona Smith. She says in a lawsuit that she was fired from teaching at Bronx PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported that she’d used the “N” word, according to The New York Post.

‘Negro.’

Smith doesn’t deny using the word. But she argues that everyone uses it, when speaking Spanish. She was teaching the Spanish words for different colors, and the color “black” in Spanish is “negro.” She also taught the junior high school students, in this bilingual school, that the Spanish term for black people is “moreno.” And by the way, Smith, who is from the West Indies, is black.

And more:

The Akron Public Schools Board of Education voted in January to pursue the firing of Melissa Cairns. She was a math teacher at Buchtel Community Learning Center.

The school district said that Ms. Cairns posted a photo on her personal Facebook page which showed 8 or 9 out of her 16 students with duct tape across their mouths. The caption read: “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!” The district says a colleague of Cairns’ notified a supervisor of the photo.

[…]This past week, Cairns was officially fired because “She showed a lack of good judgment. Her conduct was unbecoming of a teacher,” Akron Public Schools spokesman Mark Williamson told Newsnet5.

He went on to explain it wasn’t the use of the duct tape, but the posting of the photo of children on Facebook that showed poor judgement.

As you know, you can’t fire public school teachers for incompetence or sexual abuse of children.

Excerpt:

He worked just one year as a full-time teacher in New York. But he has collected nearly $1 million for 13 years for doing almost nothing.

Aryeh Eller, 46, a former music teacher at Hillcrest HS in Queens, is the longest-sitting “rubber room” teacher in the city. He was yanked from the classroom in 1999 and confessed to repeated sexual harassment of female students, according to a 2000 investigative report.

[…]Since his 1999 suspension, he has collected $943,000, plus health and pension benefits — and the total will hit $1 million this year.

Now let’s see if this focus on political correctness instead of results is working for taxpayers and students.

The Wall Street Journal:

Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education, public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent in 1975.

Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement over the period—have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High school graduation rates haven’t budged much over the last 40 years, either.

You can find more data to flesh out those claims linked at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

To remove any doubt, just take a look at the libertarian Cato Institute’s graph on public school spending vs scholastic achievement. We are are wasting money indoctrinating kids in political correctness. The extra money that we are spending on education isn’t going into making students smarter or more productive.