“Waiting for Superman” is a new documentary about our public education system that is already stimulating a lot of discussion about how to fix our ailing public schools.
But there’s no need to “wait.” Hundreds, if not thousands, of schools around the nation — such as the Durham Nativity School in Durham, North Carolina — have already been fixed.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to see how children can blossom and perform at their highest level in a manufactured box of a high school with 3,000+ students when most experts believe that the optimum size for a high school is around 1,200 students.
Kids get lost in such large populations and fall by the wayside because they cannot connect with their teachers. The dropout rate is 50% for African-American males in American today, which means that only one out of every two African-American males who start 9th grade finish12th grade. Something must be wrong.