Posted on 12/17/2006 6:32:35 AM PST by wintertime
Last year, more than 7 million American people -- that’s about one in every 32 adults -- were behind bars, on probation or parole. The United States has, for years, imprisoned more people than any other country in the world. Yet, we don’t have the highest literacy rate....
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Inner-city schools fail half of their students, and jobs are removed from communities, replaced with guns and drugs, resulting in incarceration, if you’re lucky; death if you’re not. Nonetheless, many U.S. states have cut their education budgets to compensate for rapid growth in prison populations and prison construction. The misguided priorities that inform such decisions have only served to further marginalize already oppressed populations. It’s time that this country shifts its focus away from imprisonment and commits its resources to education and empowerment.
In the past 20 years, more than a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the U.S. Yet, our prisons are more overcrowded now than ever.....(snip)... The nation’s "war on drugs" and the stiff sentencing laws that grew out of that war are largely to blame.
......The numbers of individuals sentenced for drug crimes increased nearly 65 percent between 1996 and 2003, accounting for the largest increase in inmates in the federal system.
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If federal and local governments were to adequately fund the nation’s public schools, ensuring all students had access to high-quality teachers, tutoring and after-school programs, we could stem the growth of the nation’s prison population. With support, many could be steered away from drugs and the street life and pushed towards college or vocational school. Instead, the country has poured its money into a criminal injustice system that, instead of creating special programs designed to rehabilitate the low-level offender, corals these lost souls into the nation’s prisons. Upon release, having no education and no skills, many return to the lifestyles that landed them in prison. It’s a dangerous cycle, and only prison architects and big business benefit.
In 1977, I was incarcerated for seven months. I was told that it cost taxpayers $30,000 to incarcerate me. A year later, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan University under an affirmative action program. Because I was poor, I had to use loans and tax-payer supported government grants to pay for my education. The cost of my four-year education was $24,000, less than the cost of my short jail sentence. No longer a burden to taxpayers, I am a significant taxpayer, helping, through my tax contributions, to pave the way for others who’ve yet to get an opportunity to make a way for themselves.
The tax dollars used to support my education were a worthy investment, one that benefits all of society. America should take note and act accordingly.
What right to you or the government have to "allow" or not allow this behavior?
In my department, everyday the teacher busted butt to provide the best for those kids only to have it thrown back in their faces
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Okay, I admit there are teachers that do a terrific job. But why are disruptive students allowed in the classroom? The answer is money. The school system receives Government money for each student. Why are bad teacher allowed in the classroom, because the unions won't let you fire them. Again get the Government and the Union out of the school and the problem will go away.
continue to vote for democrats to run their cities. Until the people vote the democrats out of office, screw the inner cities.
In Wisconsin, it's $13K per kid and the dropout rate in Milwaukee alone is over 50% (I can't put my fingers on the exact % right now.)
Yep. Throw more money at the problem. That'll fix it! Not.
Students fail because they care more about pimpin' hos, smokin' weed, partyin'
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The school is not a place for social work. If you want to learn, go to school. The problem is the disruptive student holds back the one who want to learn. The only reason the disruptive student is there at all is because the government says he has to be there. You can't segregate him without a court order and it's almost impossible to kick him out because the school is paid by the government per student. The answer is to remove government and unions from the school system. This, of course, will never happen. Instead they will dump billions more into the problem thus making it worse.
for some people the only way to stop them committing crimes is to lock them up.Sure it costs 30k to keep them in jail,but when they're out on the street their crimes may cost 150k or more per year.So simple economics ditates long sentences for the hard core types.
This week Bill Gates et al recommended ending local control for state control. I would go the other way and break up huge school districts into smaller districts of one high school and its feeder schools. Then, the city could heal one district at a time as schools met the needs of the parents. By the way, part of that is getting the children to school, not sitting around the teachers' lounge complaining about attendance.
Or, just do what Bush did after Katrina. Send in the helicopters and airlift people out of dysfunctional communities. Relocate them.
Do you know what you are talking about? Do you know any inner city teachers?
Inner city kids don't learn because there is no interest in learning in 80% of the families, if you can call them that.
My wife, who works twelve hour days because of short sighted programs such as no child left behind has difficulty getting parents to spend 10 minutes a day to work on spelling or match homework.
She has students who come to her that don't know their times tables at the end of third grade.
City and state boards of education with their programs of social promotion are just passing the failure UP the ladder.
People get out of the inner city because they and their parents want them to get out.
Many of the parents of my wife's students are so stoned or drunk they don't give a damn.
Starting in the early 1960's, the left did their best to transform the African-American society into wards of the state and in turn creating a loyal voting block by promising governmental welfare, no strings attached. Sadly, the African-American society continues to embrace the position that little to no proactive improvement is to be expected from their community. Meanwhile other minority zoom right past them toward the American dream.
Or you talking about Asians, who are about 3% of the population yet graduate their kids at 50% compared with whites at 41%, and blacks at 30%. Or are you talking about Hispanics who are not afraid to get their hands dirty and now out populate Blacks. Or even, Indians who are entering the computer and engineering fields while blacks are entering the football and basketball fields. Maybe your talking about recent African immigrants who generally work and are not as prone to violence because of poverty, they enter the health profession a lot and also are increasingly seen in solid professional careers.
Sure their are African American, doctors, lawyers, professional, and so on but the key is cultural expectations as a whole. I really respect the black people who choose to overcome bitterness and take advantage of this great country and also think of this country as great. I don't respect at all people who having physical straight and good health decide that the American labor system is racist, bias, and so on. The one's that say "they ain't no job out huer for a nigga", while if they would wake their lazy, ignorant, asses up maybe they would see that jobs are being realized and taken by legal and illegal immigrants.
Sigh...
Not only that, their also exists a dumbfounding reluctant to "keep it real" in regards to these obvious shortcomings in the black inner city leadership. While somethings it is mentioned but coupled with blame, the white man, the government or the society as a whole.
So allowing people to lay around get high and make unwanted babies. Is going to make high achievers?? LOL
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I said nothing of the sort.
I suggested that ending the war on drugs would help reduce the prison population.
The answer is to remove government and unions from the school system
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The answer is complete separation of SCHOOL and state. Get government out of the K-12 education business.
1 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA $13,993
2 NEW YORK $11,023
3 NEW JERSEY $10,869
...
49 ARIZONA $5,099
50 UTAH $4,674
51 NORTH DAKOTA $4,612
Anybody think that North Dakota kids are prison-bound, while DC kids are upward-bound, because the DC schools have the benefit of 3x more funding per student??
One overwhelming characteristic of the prison population is fatherlessness. Yet I read that at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, an extraordinary period of literary, artistic, and intellectual creativity in the 1920's, 90% of the children in Harlem lived in households headed by two married parents.
Put that in your clue bag.
I live in an exurb of Wash DC. Want to know why this number is so high? Special education. This school system is so filled with incompetents that a regular industry has developed with lawyers, testers and private schools.
Here's how the racket goes. Parent goes to the school and says "I want Jr. tested for special education services. Gimme the paperwork." She fills it out and turns it in. The clock is now running. The system has 60 CALENDER days to complete testing, evaluations, observations, doctor visits (if necessary), vision checks, hearing checks and a series of 3 - 4 meetings. It is rare that the people in DC get this done on time. On day 61, the mom takes what she has to her lawyer of choice (who is orchestrating this whole thing) and he has the kid tested. Because the school is out of compliance, the lawyer goes to the judge with all his information and pretty much gets the kid whatever the mom wants--private schools, tutoring, laptops -- it's Christmas come early. And DC schools pay for it all--including the bill for the attorney.
Until they figure out how to get the paperwork done that all the other school districts in the country manage to do, that 13K number will grow even larger.
How did the mom find the attorney in the first place? Advertising on TV. I see them all the time. It's a racket.
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