Posted on 09/05/2005 9:33:02 PM PDT by JRios1968
As devastating as Hurricane Katrina has been, it now presents New Orleans officials with an opportunity. The city's 60,000 public school students have been trapped in a failing system for decades. There is no reason why the public education bureaucracy and other obstacles to real reform should now follow them as they move temporarily to Texas and elsewhere.
In many respects New Orleans was a failing city long before the levees gave way. Even while other major cities got a handle on crime in the 1990s--most notably New York under Rudy Giuliani--New Orleans remained somewhat lawless. It's worth noting that many of those who've been raping and pillaging over the past week might have been safely behind bars if the city had successfully cracked down on crime over the past decade. That's one lesson to be learned from New York's experience on Sept. 11, 2001 and during the 2003 blackout. New Orleans's poverty rate is also an astounding 24%.
Public schools are another area of government failure in New Orleans. Education is the only ticket into the middle class for most kids who grow up impoverished. Yet the city has some of the worst-performing schools in the state, and this year they suffered two embarrassments. New Orleans led the state in students cheating on the state's standardized tests; indeed, more than half of all of those caught in the state were enrolled in New Orleans public schools. And the school system's finances were in such disarray the state nearly took control.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Somebody else said that quote, but I have had some thoughts along the same lines as you have too. We should have had Dutch engineers there years ago or at least the little boy with the big finger.
[...we are not the United States of Insurance]
I like this!
Sadly, we are more like the United States of Deep Pockets, or the United States of Taxes. And just because there are fully socialist countries where the government takes more money out of the private sector than it does here, doesn't mean that we have to like it any better.
Of course you'd have to let in the archealogists first to dig up any artifacts worthy of being placed in a museum and relocate cemetaries.
For some reason the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah comes to mind.
If so, they will have to bring it with them cause there ain't none there. Not in N.O. anyway.
It would be easier just to build all new structures on pontoons. Then every resident would have to have a captain's license. Instead of cabs and buses they would have tug boats to push your house where ever you want to go. That might make it tough on the postman, though.
Take that Venice.
AAAAAARRRGH! I forgot to put that in italics. I didn't say that. :) They can always get some of that Chinese dust in the air that blows over on the west coast sometimes I guess.
"Build on higher ground". Here, here. My wife and I are both in favor of building on higher ground or dumping enough rock and dirt to raise NO's foundations above sea level. To go back to the previous situation with "improved" levees is insane. Naturally your and ours models will be ignored. They'll rebuild with "stronger" levees which will fail at some future date.
hello fellow genius.
One thing struck me last week watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Commentators on all networks said New Orleans had become like a Third World country because of the storm. I couldn't help but think New Orleans had been like a Third World country for money years already. This article kind of bolsters that impression.
I will pray that you get the opportunity to impact one or more lives in the best possible way.
I'm getting tired of all the politicizing--especially from the New Orleans mayor.
Indeed...Mayor Naggin' and all the other Dims have politicized everything that has happened to this country...I hope they never learn the lesson that negativity will never win an election.
That's a multiple-way tie between Jesse Jackson, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton, Harry Reid, Jean Francois Kerry, ....
I bet they were still on the voter rolls too.
How else could the Dims completely dominate an otherwise red state?
True, but given the state of entrenchment (is that even a real word? I don't know, but I am using it!) the "educators" unions had in New Orleans, and the resulting corruption, the only possible way to clean up the mess was to do away with the entire thing and start all over. A shame it took a killer storm to accomplish this.
"I'm getting tired of all the politicizing--especially from the New Orleans mayor."
----------Indeed...Mayor Naggin' and all the other Dims have politicized everything that has happened to this country...I hope they never learn the lesson that negativity will never win an election.---------- Republicans have to watch out that they don't fall into the same trap, but some seem to have done so. Geraldo Rivera sure seemed to the other day. BTW, wasn't he a liberal at one time??
Regardless, I hope the children of New Orleans will find a school environment more conducive to then receiving an actual Education than the disastrous schools of the Big Easy.
Me too. I never recalled seeing that before, but he has been on with some conservative talk show hosts and is associated with Fox News. I still can't picture him as any of those labels.
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