Hi Gang:

The Democrats are doing a lot of hollering about the plight of inner city schools.Their answer, as always is to throw more money at the problem.

We've been doing this for years with no good results.

Two problems which are NEVER addressed need to be dealt with:

1. We need to restore law and order to the schools and classrooms.

No good teacher is going to take a job ,at any inner city school, where idiots[Dorian's favorite word] with guns are able to disrupt and threaten both teachers and students alike.

School lockers are the property of the school and should be searched at any time for guns,alcohol or drugs.

School lockers are not the property of the students,no matter what the ACLU says.

Armed police should be on duty at all schools until law and order is restored.

2.Parents need to keep their children in school.

At this time, 50% of all Black and Hispanic school children are dropping out before completing the 12th grade.

Without a high school education,these children have a very slim chance of a decent well paying job.

Throwing more money at the schools will not solve the problem until these two items are addressed and solved.

hippolips

Didn't we already go into this?

The Education question that is never asked

quote:

Originally posted by hippolips:
Hi Gang:

I am not a member of your, or any gang!

quote:

The Democrats are doing a lot of hollering about the plight of inner city schools.Their answer, as always is to throw more money at the problem.

Is it only "The Democrats" that are concerned? Don't "The Republicans" have any ideas?

quote:

We've been doing this for years with no good results.

Are you sure?

quote:

School lockers are the property of the school and should be searched at any time for guns,alcohol or drugs.

School lockers are not the property of the students,no matter what the ACLU says.

From the ACLU website:

"Is the school allowed to search our lockers?

Yes. Even without reasonable suspicion, school authorities can search students’ lockers, but they must first notify students and give them a chance to be present. This also applies to your desk, because lockers and desks are school property. But that doesn’t mean they can search inside any of your belongings that they find inside your locker or desk, like a closed purse or backpack. To search a closed personal container, the school official must have reasonable suspicion that he or she will find evidence of a violation of school rules or the law inside that container.

My stepsister was caught smoking a joint in the girl’s room at school. The next day, the principal searched my locker without even telling me. I was really upset. I don’t use drugs, and I haven’t even been in trouble at school all year. They had no reason to suspect me. Are they allowed to search lockers without telling the students?

School authorities can only search a locker without telling you ahead of time if there’s a reasonable suspicion that the locker holds materials that threaten the health, welfare and safety of students in the school. If the principal had no reason to suspect you other than what happened to your stepsister, that doesn’t sound like a reasonable search. But if someone told the principal that she got the joint from you, or the principal had some other reason to think you locker contained materials that threaten the health, welfare or safety of students, then the secret search would have been okay.

If they find anything in your locker or desk, like drugs, cigarettes or weapons, can they use it as evidence against you?

Yes. School authorities may seize any illegal materials and use them as evidence against a student in disciplinary proceedings. “Illegal material” includes any item banned at school, such as cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, knives and guns. And, there is nothing to stop school officials from telling the police what they have found and giving them the evidence. If the police bring criminal or juvenile charges, then a judge will have to decide whether the search was “reasonable” before the materials taken from you can be used as evidence in the court case.

The bottom line is: DO NOT bring anything to school that you don’t want school officials or the police to see."

'Despite the fact that there was a 40% decline in school-associated violent deaths between school years 1997-8 and 1998-9 (from 43 to 26), the number of Americans who were fearful of their schools rose nearly 50% during that same period. Even after two new well-publicized studies reported school crime to be on the decline, seven months after Columbine, more than 60% of Americans said school safety "worried them a great deal." Parents and school boards continue to call for more metal detectors, locker searches and student identification badges, even as students say they feel less safe and report more crime in schools that use these "secure" school procedures. Since the Littleton shooting, when students and school administrators talk about the safety of their schools, they might as well be speaking about different worlds...' School House Hype

'Contrary to public perception, violent crime in schools has declined dramatically since 1994. The annual rate of serious violent crime in 2003 (6 per 1,000 students) was less than half of the rate in 1994.' youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu

As we discovered in that other thread, drop-out rates seem to be at least as closely tied to income as to ethnicity (although, of course there is also a link between income and ethnicity):

'During the 12 months ending in October 2001, high school students living in low-income families dropped out of school at six times the rate of their peers from high-income families (see table 16-1). About 11 percent of students from low-income families (the lowest 20 percent) dropped out of high school; by comparison, 5 percent of middle-income students and 2 percent of students from high-income families did so...

...Another dropout measure is the status dropout rate.2 Since 1972, status dropout rates for Whites and Blacks ages 16–24 have declined, while rates for Hispanics have not decreased and remain higher than those for other racial/ethnic groups' Event Dropout Rates by Family Income, 1972–2001

I live in a rural county. Of the 110 school systems in North Carolina, it ranks near the bottom (number 100) in spending per pupil. Yet its students consistently score in the top 10 in the state on end of year testing.

It can be done, when a community of committed parents and teachers come together.

quote:

Originally posted by GarColga:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by hippolips:
Hi Gang:

I am not a member of your, or any gang!

________________________________________________

Hi Gar:

OK,if you don't want to be a member of the Gang,

then you'll have to return your Secret Magic Decoder Ring

and your Super Zapper Ray Gun.

hippolips

quote:

It can be done, when a community of committed parents and teachers come together.

By George, I think you've got it! We just have to get the kids to choose better parents and teachers.

quote:

...when a community of committed parents and teachers come together...

That's a good point. Armed guards aren't going to enhance education or prevent dropouts,and it can be tough for individual parents to makekids stay in school and learn - the answer involves the larger community and schools working together.

quote:

It can be done, when a community of committed parents and teachers come together.

Too many parents consider public schools just a continuation of the day care they had their kids in from the time they were 2 weeks old. Teachers are expected to be everything but teachers: police, psychologists, social workers, anthropologists... Administrators seek to avoid bad PR while caving into the above-mentioned parents.

[n.b.This is, I admit, an overgeneralization; but too true in many districts.]

It's a challenging problem and one that just throwing money at it won't help. I think the Democratic position is being misrepresented in the original post - Obama in particular has had a lot of experience dealing with community based leadership groups that have had great success. There is no position of just throwing money at the problem - I believe undoing the damage of "no-child left behind" and helping community groups are core to the agenda.

There is no single solution and it's hard to use an example of a poorly financed but successful school in comparison to all problem schools. There are some serious issues affecting the students in some schools that are radically different than the basic underfunded district. Digging into those issues and addressing the uncomfortable aspects is something that I think Obama has already started to address.

I did some tudoring at a so-called inner city school and it isn't a simple or easy problem to tackle. There are a LOT of problems but the most important thing is that they are problems that should be addressed and should be dealt with because it benefits us all for kids to get a good education in a safe and peaceful environment.