Posted on 08/25/2014 9:44:44 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
The specter of Michael Brown is inescapable inside his high school.
Hundreds of students, most of them African American, walk the same halls and sit in the same lunchroom as Brown did — before his hard-won graduation and, days later, his death in the middle of Canfield Drive not far away.
The American flag at the entrance of Normandy High School flies at half-staff. Students write and draw in their journals and read essays about police brutality, Brown’s fatal shooting by a white police officer on Aug. 9 considered the most vivid case study at hand.
Teachers rush from class to weep, behind closed doors, in faculty restrooms. They say they are crying not only for Brown, but also for Normandy and the students who remain in their classrooms.
If education is the gateway to a better future, the door here was shut long ago, fueling a mix of resignation and rage.
The school system’s entrenched dysfunction helps explain the street anger that has unfolded in neighboring Ferguson since Brown was killed by officer Darren Wilson in what Wilson’s supporters have called an act of self-defense.
Brown’s death came amid one of the most chaotic chapters in this failing school district’s history.
The Normandy district is on the front lines of the national school-choice debate, which at its core asks whether public policy should enable families in poor, low-performing schools to attend higher-performing public and private schools in other communities. Normandy is a test of the public system’s defenders, who say such districts must be fixed, not abandoned.
For years, Normandy High was considered the most dangerous school in the city, with abysmal test scores, underperforming teachers, a student body in which nine in 10 students qualify for subsidized or free lunches, and graduation rate that’s less than 50 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Here we go....young black man is dead because our public schools are “underfunded”...
The American flag at the entrance of Normandy High School flies at half-staff.
HUH? Who authorized that?
The flag is lowered for heroes not for criminals. This is insane...............
If 80% of the “graduates” can’t read or write, the “educators” are part of the problem. Maybe they should run out of the building and quit...instead of running to the restrooms to weep. Are they weeping about their own incompetence and possibility of losing their job. Cry me a river...
Whatever set young Brown off on the day of his death, his reported conduct strongly suggests a behavior that no society, anywhere on earth, would tolerate. He first, apparently, brutalized a shop-keeper, to satisfy a whim; then walked up the middle of a fairly busy street--if not reflecting an obvious death wish (at least sub-consciously) from a motorist unable to stop in time, certainly a total contempt for the rights of others.
Then when admonished by an officer doing his duty in respect to that self-destructive behavior, he savagely attacked that officer. An experienced law officer in any place on earth, would have responded with whatever force was necessary, to control this grossly anti-social & menacing behavior.
What the Washington Post is aiding & abetting in this "red-herring" journalism, is intervention into a local incident by out-of-town Leftists, which is going to have a chilling effect--just think about it--on young men of decent calibre, who are considering careers in law enforcement. Who, with a sense of the public good & personal honor, want to be put into a position, where they must allow an out-of-control thug--one behaving in an absolutely crazed manner--the clear advantage in a desperate confrontation; or, alternatively, subjecting themselves to a public lynching by a collection of quack journalists and experienced hate-mongers.
Of am I being unfair?
William Flax
Years ago, I read a Readers Digest article about schools in predominately black neighborhoods. In the 1930s and 1940s the children received an excellent education. The teachers wouldn’t put up with hooliganism, and were strict with the children’s homework. They even talked with the parents if the students were falling behind. Most of the teachers were also black and they wanted to elevate the children’s minds and increase their ability to compete. Now, with the likes of al Sharpton, eric holder, jessieeee Jackson, the children have little chance in these neighborhoods. It’s a shame because these students don’t seem to have a chance to assimilate or compete.
I can’t wait for the next incident to occur...I’m getting tired of reading all this crap about ferguson. The journalists need to move on to their next story. The 15 minutes is about up.
I was just going to post:
Turn the school over to 4 Carmelite Nuns (In Habits). They will turn things around in about a week!
There the liberals go again, blaming money, not immorality.
The very same DemcoRats that blacks vote for fight tooth and nail against school vouchers. Yet 95% of them will continue to vote Rat.
I found three Ben Carson Reading Rooms in St. Louis, MO
http://carsonscholars.org/reading-rooms/our-sites
Too bad this school did not utilize one of the rooms. However, it may be for the school where located.
Camden NJ spends 5X that much and didn’t produce one kid that was eligible to graduate last year.
It’s hard to fathom something this juvenile and misguided coming from a paper that once pretended to have high ideals.
The school in question, shows it’s complete disregard for civic responsibility by lowering the flag to half staff for a juvenile delinquent. Okay, he wasn’t a juvenile any longer. Good point.
Here was an adult robbing a convenience store, roughing up the person on duty there (owner?).
Lowering the flag in effect memorializes Brown, and telegraphs the student body, that thsi was a good man, someone to emulate. The police are always wrong, you are always right, even if you’re committing crimes or threatening a police officer’s life.
I’ve talked about empowerment, and what could be a better example? This young man was hell bent on killing that police officer for telling him to get out of the street.
Imagine that! This kid was so out of control, he wanted to kill a man that was actually helping him not to be a danger to himself. Get out of the street, so you’ll live. Do the papers or television folks add that in? No. Unarmed is the more important term here, to them.
I was down in Montebello last week around 12:30 in the morning. I was driving down a little street coming up to a stop sign. I noticed something odd. Lights were going off then on. It took me a moment, but I realized a person was walking across the street, dressed in black. I couldn’t see the person at all. All I could do was see the lights flicker off then on again as this person crossed the street.
Luckily I wasn’t going fast. If I had been in-between intersections going 30 miles per hour, I could very easily have run this guy down. Even after I knew a person was there, I could barely see them.
Brown could easily have had his life saved by this officer. For this he wanted the officer dead.
The Post can’t grasp this. The school officials can’t. The student body probably can’t either.
We are raising a generation of foreign nationals on our own soil. They hate our nation without cause, because they have been told they have been cheated.
We have the idiots leading the brigade.
The Post would be doing the biggest service of the last 50 years, if it would just stop publishing.
They could save all the money it cost to produce, and improve the life of every citizen in the process.
I thought he was a McCluer South student.
If this is true, then this “school” isn’t really a “school,” and needs to be closed down immediately. What’s the point of funding a failed endeavor?
Once more for emphasis.
The Normandy Schools have been putrid for decades. This isn’t news. The district has had gobs of money and has pissed it away. Yes, there are some brilliant kids living in the district but the vast majority of the students don’t give a rat’s ass about school; neither do their parents. It was out of control in the 1980s when I was a juvenile probation officer working there and in Ritenour the next district north.
Aren’t those the schools that a judge ordered the state to spend hundreds of millions improving?
Normandy. The place he was “staying” this summer was his grandma’s. And I’m sure answering the logical questions that arise from that fact would answer a slew of other questions.
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