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Friday, September 10th, 2010 | blogging

Here′s yet another sign of the times. I also saw this as a sign in the gym, so I had to look it up online. United Way’s Schools of Hope

46% of third grade students are reading at or above standard proficiency levels.

Who do you suppose those kids are, that make up nearly half of third graders, and who can’t read “at or above standard proficiency levels″? (And knowing the State of California, it’s hard to imagine that those standards are very high.)

79% of third grade students who are also English language learners tested below proficiency in reading.

Ditto.

# Fewer than 75% of ninth-graders graduate from high school in four years. This means one-fourth of our students are not completing high school with their grade level peers.
# Among socioeconomically disadvantaged youth, 55.2% of students who entered ninth grade in 2002 dropped out before graduation.

Don′t worry, these nice people will not mention the easiest way to prevent this problem from increasing in future.

But they do know another way to help.

Becoming a Volunteer Tutor
Responsibilities of a Schools of Hope volunteer tutor include:

* A commitment to a minimum of 1 hour per week during the school year, but more is better (and even more rewarding). There will also be a pool of substitute tutors available when necessary.
* Attend one 2-hour tutor training on literacy skills and strategies
* Assist children in reading, writing and other literacy based skills starting with first grade students
* Complete a tutor log following each session
* Direct questions to the volunteer coordinator at your school

I wonder who the volunteer tutors will be?

Here in Northern California wine country we have a generally affluent and well-educated population, and generally pretty SWPL, yet we also have these grim statistics, and everyone just pretends to be baffled as to the source of the problem. If only more people would volunteer to tutor, we could solve this problem – is what they say in public.

Fifty years ago, what is now the wine country was a bucolic and white part of a conservative California; parts of it are still fairly bucolic, but the wineries brought in their cheap immigrant labor, and now the schools are a mess. Don’t connect the two though, that would be discriminatory.