News-Record.com

Time to shut down these incubators of socialism and turn to the private sector where competition will insure that those who graduate can at least make the correct change at MacDonald's or read their wic voucher statements.

It's spelled: McDonald's, not MacDonalds. See? My socialist education's looking pretty good right now.

Interesting letter. We have a problem, we need "change" (I've heard that somewhere before), and everyone needs to fix it. No mention of how. Just do it.

One really important suggestion would be to stop depriving roughly 2/3 of black children of a father. It was pleasing to see Obama, at the NAACP convention of all places, asking black fathers to actually stick around and raise their children.

I just love being told I need to fix a problem that I did not cause, especially when I don't have the power to really fix it. I can't force parents to care about their children. If they ask me for help, great! I can tutor a child or teach a parent to read. But if they just expect "society" to raise their children--well, they need to be slapped upside the head.

All the programs in the world won't help as long as kids have "parents" who are absent, immature, drug-infested, or apathetic. Until a generation of parents gets back to basics--supervising children so they don't have the opportunity to get in trouble and making sure education is valued in the home--we will continue to have generation after generation of children who are never taught to succeed.

Thanks for the correction, Howie. I'm waiting for a night program for illiterate adults...

The school board has responded to this concern by getting $1/2 billion of school bonds passed to build a handful of schools, including a $88 million high school for 1,200 students, and putting it in the hands of people responsible for that construction who are obviously incompetent.

Yes, the answer is always "more money".

The "achievement gap" is the focus of school districts around the country. It has been for roughly 40 years. Here is a fairly typical recent report --- in this instance on California's achievement gap:

Summit called to address racial disparities in academic performance
Nanette Asimov, [San Francisco] Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, November 12, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/12/MNH8T5LTC.DTL

Is there any way to break out of this pattern? GCPS has produced an extensive report, linked in the letter. I hope to get to it, but I will make a comment on one elephant-in-the-room facet of the phenomenon already noted by many commenters above: the investment by parents in the education of their children.

At the top of the academic achievement pyramid are Jews and East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese), then whites, then Hispanics and African-Americans. Not surprisingly, at the top of the heap in terms of investment by parents of their own time in the education of their children are Jews and Asians.

See this sketch below of one Asian-American immigrant family's laser-like focus on Academic Achievement – despite impoverished origins in China. The excerpt is from THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999) by Nicholas Lemann. pp 180-181. It describes the childhood of a well-known civil rights attorney:

...His [Bill Lann Lee’s] father, Lee Wei-lim, was the youngest son in a family from a poor fishing village in China, a place plagued by murderous bandits; his parents sent him away as a child to be raised with relatives in Canada because they wanted to be sure that one of their offspring would survive to adulthood. When he grew up he returned to China, married, went back to North America, and drifted to New York City during the Depression. He Americanized his name to William Lee and opened a laundry.

For someone who spoke no English and had no access to capital, a Chinese hand laundry was a good way to make a bare-bones but fairly secure livelihood. An immigrant’s whole family could work around the clock in a laundry . . .

Although William Lee came from a background nowhere near the mandarin class in China, he was still the product of a society in which education was the highest value and considered the best way to get ahead. William Lee believed in hard work, not culture – reading a book for pleasure, or attending a concert or play, was to him unthinkably frivolous. Still he constantly pushed his son Bill to study, without knowing what it was that Bill was studying. Bill and his younger brother Ernest spent their free time working in the laundry.

It was the family’s good luck that they happened to live in the American city [New York] with the most advanced apparatus for selecting a meritocratic elite through the school system. From elementary school onward Bill took standardized mental tests and, on the basis of his scores, he was put onto a separate gifted-student track – with the result that during his childhood, he studied at small, nearly all-white virtual schools contained within the big, mostly black public schools. The New York City public-school system had (and still has) a handful of high schools that admit students from all over the city by competitive examination. It was assumed in the Lee family that Bill would go to one of these. Bill’s own preference was the High School of Music and Art; he put a good deal of time into assembling a portfolio of drawings for the admissions committee. For his parents, though, the High School of Music and Art was out of the question – it would lead only to careers that were terrifyingly insecure and unstable. Instead he went to the Bronx High School of Science, where children and grandchildren of immigrants lacking any connections or social polish, speaking in nonmellifluous city accents, would hurl themselves into demanding school subjects and technical course work and wind up with real, solid quantifiable academic accomplishments, of the kind that would always be a good meal ticket, no matter how personally awkward you were.

At Bronx Science, then mostly Jewish, now mostly Chinese- and Korean-American, nobody bothered to conceal beneath a veneer of uplifting rhetoric the connection between grinding away for good grades and escaping from the lower middle class. The student newspaper published everyone’s academic averages, as if to keep at bay any ambient urges toward well-roundedness that might be at large in the student body . . .

COMMENT: Academic achievement is not life's be-all and end-all. The improvisational abilities of many African-American males have vaulted some to the top in several highly visible fields, but only a relatively few can make a living that way. Academics matters for the rest of us. That being the case, the value our parents place on education is of utmost importance.

As long as their is a parent-investment-in-their-children's-education gap, there will be an achievement gap.

Clearly this shows our desperate need for more atriums.

let's not forget that not only black children but white children bussed into predominently black schools get the same education as the black children, thus the white males that went to the same school as the tested black males should be tested as well, for more accurate statistics, and to define exactly wherein the problem lies.

I wrote this article a few years ago.

http://www.helium.com/debates/78768-should-america-abandon-racial/side_by_side?page=26&search_result=true

The schools referred to in this article are Rankin Elementary-Guilford County..and
Level Cross Elementary -Randolph County

"Thanks for the correction, Howie. I'm waiting for a night program for illiterate adults..."

Sorry, neocon. All the money went to Mrs. Easley's plane rides, and the Fed Ex hub. Good luck to you :)