DisEducation Triage

If a restaurant failed health standards 8 years in a row, should it remain open?

So what should be done with schools that have failed educational standards 8 years in a row?

Well, if you're the Puerto Rico Department of DisEducation, you pretend they don't exist. You act as if those schools were aberrations, even though schools that have failed No Child Left Behind standards (the Enron/AIG of educational standards) for 5+ years amount to 19% of Our total school system.

Nineteen. Freaking. Percent. That means that for 5, 6, 7 or 8 years--and now 9--19% or more of Our revolting excuses for schools have utterly failed in meeting the agreed-upon standards. Add in the schools at 3+ years of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) failure and you have over 34% of Our schools in sub-standard mode.

But look more closely at the problem and you see an even more alarming trend: Over 61% of the failed schools are junior high/intermediate schools, encompassing 7th, 8th and 9th grades. Almost half of the intermediate public schools We have are abject failures, not only at teaching, but at retaining students. For not only is there a teaching problem, the dropout rates in those grades starts soaring to disastrous heights and in full ostrich mode, the DisEducation herd pretends it isn't happening.

Billions of dollars have been funneled into this bottomless pit, made so by incompetence, politicking, ignorance, theft, immorality and short-sightedness. DisEducation is the department where Our Past lies buried, Our Present gets embalmed and Our Future is a wake.

If this (non)Administration, this (outhouse)legislature and DisEducation department were truly--truly--interested in resuscitating Our Future and making a true positive change in education, it would aggressively target intermediate schools to both reduce the failed-standards rate and dramatically decrease the dropout rate.

From restaurants to hospitals: Triage is the process by which the highest priority gets the swiftest treatment. Somebody explain to the Fools that triage is not a fancy word for raping the public treasury, but the conceptual lens needed to actually do something useful for a change.

The Jenius Has Spoken.