Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
i said my kids' school was fine. we live at 10 mile road. my son has 10 friends that the following applies to:
no dad, strong mom. kid started in Detroit schools. by third grade or so the mom busted something to get the kid an address north of 8 mile, and in my kids' friends, north of 10 mile. at the same time lots of other parents dragged junior to charter schools.
result? the kids left in Detroit schools drop out at 60%. I believe in our earlier rehash of this argument you suggested the concerned parents who dragged their kids out of these fucked up schools were at fault, and I asked if you, you brave pioneer, would leave your child in a school with a 60% dropout rate, since your kid being there would marginally improve the school.
you ignored the question. I'll answer that I would get my kid the fuck of out dodge, and I do not blame any parent who did the same.
you new theory is to take teachers that are deemed "Good" and make them quit one school district and go to some other? like freedom to contract is gone in your world?
I don't have a solution to fix how fucked up it is for the kids stuck after everyone who can get out gets out, but your "choice; they can homeschool, is broken because our dads could have had this same discussion.
annotated version: the whole world doesn't live in colonials an hour outside both napa and muir.
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No shit. But what I'm saying is that schools are a reflection of the community they serve. They do not and cannot save that community from itself, no matter how much we would like to think the American Dream can be kick-started by one Jaime Escalante character per school.
I'm saying, we all have choices and what we have chosen is this: that the quality of an American education varies widely based on the resources and capacity of one's parents. We cry about this, but we do nothing to change it. People like Penske blame the school administrators and the unions for wanting the system to be this way. That is bullshit. The American people want the system to be this way, because (1) it's what they voted for one way or another; (2) the people who have excess capacity in their daily struggle to survive for their kid's education manage to have enough we-clawed-our-way-out stories to provide false anecdotal hope that people in horrifying situations can succeed if they make the right sacrifices and (3) all the people who vote have kids in good-enough schools.
BTW, before you hop on any bandwagon with Penske, we should be clear on something -- does P think we should have a system of public schools, and if so, should that system have the same, more or fewer resources than the system we have? Because I suspect the answer he'll give is the same Republican bullshit we've always gotten -- "all the inputs are bad EXCEPT money, which looks fine from here" -- and crying about inner city teens is just his way of railing against the system because he knows it's a cheap way to buy credibility on the topic.
