[wcgo2]

check out http://teenagertalks.blogspot.com/

[Dark Skies]

bttt

[coconutt2000]

Unions prevent the application of capitalism to the labor force in every industry where the unions exist.

In airlines, poor performers that meet the bar minimum are rewarded as frequently or almost as frequently as those that work hard. I have an uncle who worked for ages for an airline and he worked hard. The union took their dues, and ensured that the slackers got to keep their jobs at the expense of promotions for the truly motivated.

In schools - teachers just aren't provided with an incentive to achieve results. It is considered crass to apply reality to the acquisition of knowledge. Such a noble profession should be governed by the spiritual reward of teaching young minds, not by the ability of the teacher to actually teach. Crass or not, our education system is in dire need of a reality check. At some point, lowering standards every year just isn't going to work.

[Tax-chick]

Pretty good ... check your capitalization!

[Shawndell Green]

"Bad teachers should be paid less. Good teachers should be paid more."

Fine, but that will not solve the problem. If you check on the expenditures per student, you will find that as much money is spent educating the average black student as is spent education the average white student.

"Despite glaring economic inequalities between a few rich suburbs and nearby central cities, the average black child and the average white child now live in school districts that spend almost exactly the same amount per pupil. Black and white schools also have the same average number of teachers per pupil, the same pay scales, and teachers with almost the same amount of formal education and teaching experience. The most important resource difference between black and white schools seems to be that teachers in black schools have lower test scores than teachers in white schools. This is partly because black schools have more black teachers and partly because white teachers in black schools have unusually low scores."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html


Students of ethnicities other than black also have both bad and good teachers, but they do better academically even when attending the same schools.

Asian students do well enough in so called bad high schools in urban San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles that they are able to go to the University of California at Berkeley.

"the Thernstroms reinforce a well-known, yet vital point: Asian students do better than any others including whites because of resolute family expectations. The Thernstroms say "hard work is a culturally transferable trait."
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/noexcuses/html/r-tst.html

Black students attending school in school systems in which they are a significant part of the student population and where the students come from comfortable middle class families and where expenditures per student are relatively high, still do poorly academically compared to other ethnic groups.

""No matter how you reform schools, it's not going to solve the problem," he said in an interview. "There are two parts of the problem, society and schools on one hand and the black community on the other hand."

Professor Ogbu's latest conclusions are highlighted in a study of blacks in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb whose school district is equally divided between blacks and whites. As in many racially integrated school districts, the black students have lagged behind whites in grade-point averages, test scores and placement in high-level classes. Professor Ogbu was invited by black parents in 1997 to examine the district's 5,000 students to figure out why.

"What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don't know how their parents made it," Professor Ogbu said in an interview. "They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children."
http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm


"Berkeley High tried to lift urban black and Latino pupils to the level of high-performing Asians and whites. But a sizable divide persists."
http://www.smallschoolsworkshop.org/lat090402jmglionna.html

"As a group, African American students are the worst performing in the nation. They earn the lowest grades and test scores at every level from elementary school through law school. This pattern is not merely confined to those isolated in rural areas or poor inner-city communities. Even in prosperous suburbs such as Fairfax County, Va., Evanston, Ill., and Shaker Heights, Ohio, educators are struggling against a tide of underachievement among black students.

"You see it again, again and again," McWhorter says. "It is not a fluke."

"The stubborn achievement gap separating black and white students is a problem that has baffled educators for years. From the beginning, African American preschoolers score much lower than whites in vocabulary tests, setting a pattern that is evident through graduate and professional school."

http://www.racematters.org/mcwhorter.htm

[itzmygun]

Discipline. Even the best teacher in the world can't teach if his or her hands are tied when it comes to discipline. Even good kids underachieve when there are no consequences. You may as well take all the unions-bad-teacher talk and put it on the shelf until we stop handling kids as if they're going to break.

When I was in school, if I didn't get the grades, it was my fault. If I got in trouble at school, I was in even more trouble at home. My brother teaches (7th grade) and his only recourse when a student does bad is to send him or her to the office. He recently had a kid stand up in the middle of the class and start screaming obscenities and throwing stuff at another kid. Do you know what the (obviously liberal) counselor does? Lets him play a video game until he's calmed down and then sends him back to class (the all-powerful "timeout"). When my brother complained about this, he was told that the school didn't want the parents coming in and causing a bunch of trouble, and it was up to him to work something out (Doesn't it say something that this kid was allowed back into class after a violent act, but if he had drawn a picture of a gun, he probably would have been suspended for the rest of the year).

He's constantly attacked by parents who think their precious little child can do no wrong. Somehow it's always his fault.

He's a damn good teacher, but he's about to give up. So much for income incentives.

It's not surprising, though. This is the evil the liberals have released on us. It's never your fault; someone is trying to keep you down or simply hates you for no reason. How easy that excuse is. It's no wonder kids have picked up on it so quickly.

[Texas_Conservative2]

No one is forces the blacks to live in ghettos such as Harlem and Compton.

They could move into an apartment in a predominately white upper middle class area with good schools, but they choose not to. You'd think the KKK had Harlem and Compton surrounded and wouldn't let any blacks out, the way this article is written.

[swmobuffalo]

Until black society stops encouraging the "black" way of thinking ie don't excel, don't speak proper English, don't act "white", pick on the ones that do try to excel, black children are never going to get anywhere. It would also be helpful if the parents actually demanded the kids learn while they're in school.

[Kevin OMalley]

We have been discussing ways to fast track kids through high school to avoid the liberal agenda and other idiocies:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1315730/posts?page=84#84

Unfortunately my thread title was not well thought out, because some parents might instinctively skip over it due to attached stigma, whether real or imagined.