Whoops! College student who 'secretly' deflated neighbor's tires..leaves with contact info

The Daily Mail ^ | February 24, 2016

[kearnyirish2]

Our public schools are the same here in NJ; it seems you’re automatically promoted if you just show up, and can enhance your grades with irrelevant “extra credit” (bringing in canned food for a food drive, for example). Every parent thinks their child is a genius, and when they realize the truth it is too late - they’ve been hornswaggled...

[Political Junkie Too]

Did the kid learn to deflate his neighbor's tires in China, or did he learn that over here when he should have been studying?

-PJ

[ByteMercenary]

Early in my college days I was part-timing at an engineering design firm. One of my co-workers owned a cherry 1968 Pontiac GTO with 400ci, triple-deuce carbs, Hurst 4-speed shifter, custom satin-black paint job and other goodies. He paid extra for a covered parking space that was located between two pillars - extra protection against parking lot rash. One week someone else in the building parked in this most treasured spot and the car stayed there for a week. My co-worker left 4-5 notes advising the driver to leave.

The following Monday my co-worker let the air out of the tires and then put epoxy into the valve stem openings. He had also put epoxy under the deflated part of the tires that touched the asphalt.

Of course we knew when the car owner found out because the tow truck driver couldn’t simply air up the tires so he had to jack up the car all around which ripped the tread off some of the tires, then take the wheels to get new tires mounted, re-install the wheels. Needless to say the parking spot was unoccupied the next morning.

[mrsmel]

The left many years ago decided that “everyone is entitled to a college education” (including people who should have been in vocational/trade schools by at high school if not junior high). It’s not that they believe everyone has what it takes to be college material, that much is self-evidently untrue, it’s that that the was the best way to ensure that all young people were subject to the leftist indoctrination.

[mrsmel]

It sounded like that to me also, based on the subject matter of his choices and the syntax of the sentences. It doesn’t sound like ebonics or just plain old bad grammer.

[Smokin' Joe]

It’s a minor problem. More money for education will fix this...(/s)

[mrsmel]

And a garden-variety American born student with mere bad grammer doubtfully would have used “Please”, no matter how hypocritically (after letting the air out of the person’s tires?!)

[mrsmel]

Yep, the court-ordered, taxpayer extorted public school hornwoggle proved that that was the magic bullet, see Kansas City

Once Clark decided for the plaintiffs, he didn't ask them to do things on the cheap. When it came time to fill in the plan's specifics, he invited them to "dream"(15)--to use their imaginations, push the envelope, try anything that would both achieve integration and raise student scores. The idea was that Kansas City would be a demonstration project in which the best and most modern educational thinking would for once be combined with the judicial will and the financial resources to do the job right. No longer would children go to schools with broken toilets, leaky roofs, tattered books, and inadequate curricula. The schools would use the most modern teaching techniques; have the best facilities and the most motivated teachers; and, on top of everything else, be thoroughly integrated, too. Kansas City would show what could be done if a school district had both the money and the will. It would be a model for educational reformers throughout the nation.

When estimates of the cost of the initial version of the plan came back, the lawyers and education activists who had designed the plan were shocked at their own audacity.(16) The $250 million cost was a staggering amount in a district whose normal budget was $125 million a year. But that was only the start. By the time he recused himself from the case in March 1997, Clark had approved dozens of increases, bringing the total cost of the plan to over $2 billion--$1.5 billion from the state and $600 million from the school district (largely from increased property taxes).

With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.

To entice white students to come to Kansas City, the district had set aside $900,000 for advertising, including TV ads, brochures, and videocassettes. If a suburban student needed a ride, Kansas City had a special $6.4 million transportation budget for busing. If the student didn't live on a bus route, the district would send a taxi. Once the students got to Kansas City, they could take courses in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin. The computer magnet at Central High had 900 interconnected computers, one for every student in the school. In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. They absorbed their physics from Russian-born teachers, and elementary grade students learned French from native speakers recruited from Quebec, Belgium, and Cameroon.(17)

For students in the classical Greek athletic program, there were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to Senegal and Mexico.(18)

The ratio of students to instructional staff was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.(19) There was $25,000 worth of beads, blocks, cubes, weights, balls, flags, and other manipulatives in every Montessori-style elementary school classroom. Younger children took midday naps listening to everything from chamber music to "Songs of the Humpback Whale." For working parents the district provided all-day kindergarten for youngsters and before- and after-school programs for older students.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

[reg45]

Yes, his English is poor. But it is not his native language. He is probably an international student from China. I meet Chinese people regularly. I never criticize their English skills - their English is better than my Chinese!

On the other hand, there are people who are "native" English speakers whose English skills are truly atrocious.

[Jack Hammer]

How did this character even graduate high school???

[PLMerite]

“Lighting Up Mary” would be a good name for a band.

[mrsmel]

Results of the Kansas City Experiment

By the time Judge Clark took himself off the case in March 1997, he was a deeply frustrated man. For more than 20 years he had devoted 20 percent of his time as a judge to the Kansas City case.(79) And despite all the effort he had made to order the plan, fund the plan, and keep the plan on track--often in the face of intense opposition from the very people he was trying to help--the plan wasn't working. The number of white suburban students attracted to the district by all the new magnet schools was less than 10 percent of the number that Clark had expected.(80) Year after year the test scores would come out, the achievement levels would be no higher than before, and the black-white gap (one-half a standard deviation on a standard bell curve) would be no smaller.(81)

Although the initial gap was small, by the 12th grade, blacks' scores on standardized tests were about three years behind those of whites (10.1 vs. 13.1).(82) At Central High School, which tended to attract suburban white computer hackers, white males were five years ahead of black males on standardized tests.(83) "While there is some good teaching and learning going on in KCMSD schools," Clark concluded in his March 1997 final order, "there is a great deal of poor teaching and little learning in many schools."(84)

Despite intense and unrelenting effort, the district also found it impossible to eliminate almost-all-black schools. The reason wasn't racism, either--the district had a black school superintendent, a majority black school board, and a black school board president. In 1996 nonwhite enrollment exceeded 90 percent at 4 high schools, 2 middle schools, and 10 elementary schools.(85) Clark could have ordered intradistrict transfers to distribute whites equally, but he feared that the white parents would do what other whites had done in the past--enroll their children in private schools or pull up stakes and leave the district or even the state. The border between Kansas City, Missouri, and Johnson County, Kansas, runs right down the middle of the metropolitan area. For people wanting to escape the reach of the court by leaving Missouri entirely, doing so was in some cases as simple as moving across the street.(86)
Although the district had once hoped to have enough white suburban students to bring down the black/white ratio to 60 percent black, 40 percent white, the percentage of nonwhites (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians) increased every year, going from 73 percent at the start of the desegregation plan to 80 percent in the spring of 1997.(87)

In his final order, Judge Clark blamed the failure on the district: "Because of the KCMSD's troubled past, the district has lost the confidence of many of its staff, students, parents, and the community at large--already low achievement scores have fallen in the last year or two and the debacles of the School Board have provided near constant fodder for the news media."(88)

The average black student's reading skills increased by only 1.1 grade equivalents in four years of high school.(89) At Central High, complained Clark, black males were actually scoring no higher on standardized tests when they graduated as seniors than they had when they enrolled as freshmen four years before.(90) Most annoying to the judge, the district seemingly had no idea what it really spent on various budget line items. Instead of adhering to a budget, Clark wrote, the district simply "threw" some money into a given account, and the departments could overspend or underspend as they saw fit. Despite repeated requests from the court, the district couldn't put together a security plan, a staff development program, or a core curriculum--something it had needed since the desegregation plan had gone into effect 12 years earlier.(91)

Clark had reason to be annoyed. Back in 1985 his chief educational adviser had sat on the witness stand in his court and had confidently assured him that, if he funded the proposed plan, student achievement on standardized tests would climb above state averages in less than five years.(92) But then Kansas City got all the money any school district could ever want, and essentially nothing changed.

"I don't know who sold the judge that bill of goods [that students would meet state norms in five years,]" Annette Morgan, a Kansas City Democrat and chairwoman of the Missouri House Education Committee said in 1995. "I always thought that was ludicrous. If they had done that they would have achieved the attention of everyone else because that has not been done any place I know of."(93)

No one was more disappointed than former school board president Sue Fulson. "I truly believed," she told the Harvard Project on School Desegregation in 1992, "if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed that they would truly make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see not just results, but dramatic results, educationally. And [the fact we didn't] is my bitterest disappointment."(94)

Judge Clark was so disappointed that at one point he suggested that he would keep control of the district until test scores reached national norms. That left Missouri in a bit of a bind. For one thing, no big city school district had ever met national norms (they had their own standard--big city norms), and, as Justice Scalia pointed out in exasperation when the case finally got to the Supreme Court, by definition, "half the country is below national norms!"(95) The other problem was one of incentives. As long as Clark kept control, the state was obligated to send the district upwards of $100 million a year with no say in how the money was spent. Furthermore, given the extensive facilities and new programs the district had created, it was money the district couldn't do without. If the district did unexpectedly and unaccountably happen to raise test scores to national norms, the money would cease and the district would go bankrupt.

After all these years since, the left just ignores this implementation of everything they's ever asked for, and its failure to achieve even one of the results they claimed for it if they got everything they wanted, even beyond their wildest dreams, which was supposed to ensure that their ostensible goals-the closing of the gap, and "equal" facilities-were achieved. The facilities were not only "equal", they exceeded their dreams.

Yet here they are in 2016, still talking about "inequality" in resources as being the reason that black and Hispanic students still haven't closed the gap.

And still in many black districts (such as DC), more money is spent per student than the average, with the same lack of results.

[Tax-chick]

No idea. Maybe tire-deflating is a thing in China.

[Tax-chick]

The writing isn’t all that bad. Many American high school graduates would do far worse. I doubt his imperfect English was the reason for his bad grade.

[Smokin' Joe]

That little "(/s)" at the end of my post means "end sarcasm", just in case you missed it.

Unfortunately, I live in a state where higher ed gets almost everything they ask for, whether they deserve it or not.

Thanks for posting that, though, it hammers home the point.

[mrsmel]

Yes, I understood, I’ve used it myself on occasion:) I just decided that this would be a good place to provide strong evidence of the truth of your statement.

[mrsmel]

I should say, the truth of your implied statement, owing to the use of the sarcasm tag.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

All your parking space are belong to us.

[thefactor]

And the fact that the name begins with a “Y”.

[Travis T. OJustice]

Smarter than your average Cruz/Hillary supporter, however.