Students Don’t Need ‘Mindfulness.’ They Need Reading And Math.

It ranks academically in the bottom 10% in the state, and when I attended, it was so overcrowded that we had split sessions for a while. Students brought guns to class in hollowed-out books, and my hair was set on fire after a football game by a fan of the losing team. The situation grew so bad that New Jersey Supreme Court stepped in. In 1985, it ruled that students in school districts like mine got an education so inadequate, it violated the state constitution, and it mandated better funding for what became known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Abbott Districts</a>. But the underperforming districts needed more than cash. A decade ago, 17 years after the Abbott ruling, the graduation rate at my old high school bottomed out at 59%. The national average is 85%. That rate has risen, but vast problems remain. <a href="https://medium.com/the-polis/students-dont-need-mindfulness-they-need-reading-and-math-cc7c46b33d7d">Website</a>