Ypsilanti’s Washtenaw International High School ranks 2nd in statewide ACT rankings

The Ann Arbor News interviewed me yesterday and asked if I feel safe in Ypsilanti while i was eating a bowl of kale salad in the alleyway on work break. Channel 7 news Detroit has asked me that before. Safer here than Ann Arbor and Detroit! Geeeeez.

actually Lynne, they just posted an article the other day on there with the crime statistics of the county. Comparing the per capita violent crime stats from the Ypsi Police Department and AAPD, you are about 4 times more likely to be robbed in Ypsi than AA. Comparing all violent crimes, ypsi’s rate is double ann arbor’s.

also, this entire thread stinks of inferiority.

Dan, and you’re still more likely to die in a car crash on your morning commute than be the victim of a violent crime while spending the day in Ypsi. Humans suck at risk assessment.

The first ranked high school statewide for ACT is the other IB high school that Mr. Okema started.

Yeah. The crime in Detroit is higher too. I once got into a huge argument with a dude when I was in Hamburg about Detroit. He couldn’t believe that I actually lived there and didn’t know anyone who had been raped or murdered. I still don’t know anyone who was murdered in Detroit or anyone who was raped by a stranger.

Here is the thing about violent crime too, both in Detroit and Ypsilanti. Most violent crime is not random. The victim is usually familiar with the criminal. Josh sums it up quite well, humans are not good at risk assessment. Heck, look at how many people think pit bulls are dangerous to children even though children are WAY more likely to be harmed by their own parents.

“hey, my kid might get abused by his father, so why don’t I add a pitbull to the mix”

While Community also has a lottery system, I would argue that it’s a much more welcoming school to students with IEPs – there is a support system of TCs and an infrastructure for students who receive special education services which does not seem apparent at WiHi. It would be interesting to compare the number of students with IEPs at WiHi versus Community. On perception alone, WiHi does not seem like a school willing or built to take students with a variety of learning differences (or perhaps only mild learning differences). A model of a comprehensive high school that offers IB classes (as opposed to only full diploma) will serve a much broader and diverse spectrum of students.

It’s odd to me that people try to deny that Ypsilanti has a problem with crime. Just because no one on this blog has been the victim of crime, doesn’t mean that others have not.

I have never been robbed at gunpoint in Nairobi though I have experienced crime in Ann Arbor. That does not indicate that Nairobi is safer than Ann Arbor.

Actually, denying it is somewhat disrespectful to all the people who have been victims of crime in Ypsilanti. It’s as if their experience do not matter.

They have a lottery for admissions – this year – for next year’s students, is the first year they have needed to use it. Students who apply for admissions must take some tests, however, they are not admitted/refused based on the tests. If they score below a certain level they have to take classes over the summer to prepare for the academics. If they aren’t willing to do this, then they can’t go to WIHI. They are not screened out based on how they do on the tests. WIHI gets all special ed services thru Ypsilanti schools, I believe. So any TC or other services needed would come from there.
The program is very rigorous, it attracts students and families who want a high powered education. In this regard, it is somewhat self selecting.

“Just because no one on this blog has been the victim of crime, doesn’t mean that others have not.”

That is a big presumption. I have been the victim of crimes in my life however the only place where I was ever a victim of a violent crime, I was in Ann Arbor, Detroit, or Ferndale. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think Ypsilanti has a crime problem but I know that because of the nature of most crimes (i.e. they are not random and the victims know their attackers), I am pretty much just as safe walking down the street in Ypsilanti as I am in Ann Arbor. Any difference in safety is minor. I mean if your chances of being robbed are 1 in a 1000, and one place has double that crime rate, you’ll find that 2 in 1000 isn’t really all that much more risky than 1 in a 1000.

How nice to have another option for high school. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but my brother got a great education at Community High School. As an Ypsi-living school-of-choice student in the Ann Arbor district my child isn’t eligible for the Commie lottery, so it looked like if she was looking for a different secondary experience we could only consider private schools. And by “consider” I mean that we would have to try and come up with a lot of money we don’t have to try and pay for it. I like knowing that if she stays academically aggressive that she could choose an IB program. I’ll look forward to watching the program develop in the meantime.

I wonder if Ypsilanti has ever considered a small open classroom school modeled after Ann Arbor Community High School. It seems like there is a demand for that sort of school such that it could help bring in kids from nearby communities as well as serving the kids within the district better.

This is great news about WiHi, though it’s important to remember tests are a single measure that usually demonstrate memory as opposed to application. They certainly don’t measure creativity, which has all but been quashed from public and charter K-12 schools.

On another note, WiHi has an enormous playing field – probably four acres or so – that appears to be unused. I run my dog there frequently, but it’s a shame the school doesn’t appear to have more robust outdoor programs in athletics, agriculture, life sciences, etc. It looks like a wasted space.

Re: Homeschooling. I’ve known more than one family that has taken this route. The thing that really floored me was how long my friends spent doing the home schooling. I think they spent around 20 mins – an hour a day doing schoolwork and then they just let their kids play the rest of the time. To me, it was an excellent example of how much time gets wasted during regular school.

Well Anonymous Mike, how would you judge such a thing? Since all of these kids are well above average in terms of reading and math skills (and in one family, the kids are additionally multilingual), I am assuming that their parents are doing ok. Of course, the best comparison would be to how they would have performed in school but you can’t know that and a lot of the research suggests that if these kids were put into even the worst performing schools, they would likely have good educational outcomes anyways so it may be that these children’s educational success is not based on their parents’ skills as homeschoolers. *shrug*.

The average homeschooled student spends about 3 hours per day, 5 days a week to learn a curriculum that is more encompassing than any public school student. The rest of each day is used for field trips, independent study, volunteer work, household chores or social activities and sports. The student progresses at his own pace without needless repetition of skills already mastered or frequent interruptions for discipline. Many outstanding curriculum packages can be purchased, so each parent doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are online assessments to test progress and expert consultants for advice on additional strategies to master difficult concepts. Those parents who dump their children into public schools and expecct that their children are being taught to their maximum capabilities are being grossly irresponsible (in my opinion).

I completely disagree that 40 minutes isn’t enough time. I can see first hand that it IS enough time for the children to learn the things they don’t want to learn. They spend the rest of their time learning the things they want to learn because learning is fun. There is no need to provide so much structure to it or at least there are kids who do better without so much structure. In some cases the structure becomes a source of frustration to the point where a natural love of learning gets replaced with an avoidance of learning.

Frosted Flakes, I honestly don’t understand why so many people feel that unstructured time is idle time or that kids aren’t learning if they are having fun.

EOS I notice that you haven’t commented on the thread about the 120 young refugees from South America being sent north to Michigan while they await their immigration hearings. As a Christian, I’m sure you don’t have an issue with it, but I’m curious to know what you think about the reactions of the people in Vassar.

Probably different approaches work differently with different children. In this family, the parents spent around 40 minutes per day working through some curriculum provided to them from the state (California if you are interested). Otherwise, they just let the kids learn on their own. Both kids are HUGE readers to the point where they have to constantly tell their kids to stop reading all of the time.

They’ve also traveled the world with these kids. One thing about kids is that they just absorb languages without any formal learning. So the kids both speak French (from when they lived in France) and Swiss-German (from when they lived in Switzerland). The eldest also speaks Spanish and the youngest is learning Chinese. These kids are so far ahead of their peers academically that it isn’t even funny. I think they are exactly the sort of kids who find public education soul crushing.

However, now that they are older, they are engaged in more formal instruction. The 14 year old has enrolled at the local community college and the 10 year old spends her allowance on private Chinese lessons as well as some formal art classes. I was surprised at the 14 year old’s adjustment to a more formal class environment. She needed some guidance about managing her time regarding studying with a test deadline and having due dates for the assignments but she adjusted remarkably quickly, imho.

I am pretty sure that the 40 minutes a day was not the result of lazy parenting although I don’t see why that matters. The point is that if we could, as a society, start taking a “less is more” approach to our education *and* our work lives, I think we would find that we can get more done with less stress. I get it that 40 minutes a day is an extreme that may not work for many kids but I’ll bet we could 1/2 our school days at public schools and 1/4 them for homeschoolers and get, in many cases, even better results.

There is no doubt that there is a lot of evidence that things such as the educational attainment of parents and their socio-economic status are much bigger factors in educational performance than anything else. I submit that for such students, the public school model is a failure and a waste of their time. From my point of view, for students such as this, who are able to quickly master “reading, writing, and arithmetic”, allowing them to follow their own interests in an unstructured environment is more beneficial to them than forcing them to sit in a mind numbing classroom doing busy work.

Anyways, I like the idea of having lots of different schools of choice, each of which has a different educational philosophy, so that parents can choose what works best for their individual child. One model could spend 40 minutes on formal classroom instruction of “the basics” with the rest of the day spent on other less formal methods of instruction. I went to a private school like this myself. We spent 2 hours rather than 40 minutes on math and writing but with class sizes of around 6. What if we had a school where kids could go for half days with smaller class sizes? We do kids a huge disservice by keeping them in school all day when they would be better off playing outside for a large part of that time.