Free Republic

<p>City teenagers are 10 times more likely to drop out of high school than their wealthy suburban counterparts, according to state Education Department data released yesterday. And those Big Apple students who remain in school are enrolled in classes that are 38 percent larger than those in affluent school districts - that's if the city kids show up at all.</p>

<p>The racial achievement gap in education is the major civil rights issue of our time. But the old solutions won't make the grade.</p> <p>THE STUDENT BODY of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools, and a long-established black middle class. But in an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2001, there was not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in number 21 stands for 20, though, was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs.</p>

How the Unions Killed a Dream A Philanthropist withdraws his offer to donate $200 million to Detroit's inner city public schools Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003 In 1999, an unassuming Michigan road builder named Bob Thompson sold his construction company for $442 million, an amount he and his wife Ellen believed was far more than they needed for retirement. His first act, which received national attention, was to distribute $128 million to his employees; about 80 became instant millionaires. Then Thompson decided to donate most of the rest of his money to public education, preferably in Detroit. After doing some research,...

<p>Gary Stillman, the director of a small K-8 charter school in Buffalo, New York, is an RFID believer.</p> <p>While privacy advocates fret that the embedded microchips will be used to track people surreptitiously, Stillman said he believes that RFID tags will make his inner city school safer and more efficient.</p>

At-Risk Children’s Drama Group In Jeopardy Children from "Angry Theater" role play to learn how to handle potentially dangerous situations. The program targets youths from violent neighborhoods. By MICHAEL CHANDLER Contributing Writer Friday, October 10, 2003 A single bulb lights up the stairwell in a West Oakland housing project just before two X-Men characters, Magneto and Wolverine, come to life. They battle fiercely, Wolverine struggling to defend himself against Magneto's mutant powers. But before long, Wolverine is backed into a corner, Magneto poised to lunge after him. "Freeze!" yells UC Berkeley senior Katherine Morgan. "Now, de-escalate!" Magneto backs away...

Jack Fletcher, professor of developmental pediatrics at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center, said that reading and comprehension skills are essential for students to learn other subjects. "Years back, schools stopped emphasizing reading as much," Fletcher said, "and now we're realizing that if children are not reading by grade level in third grade, they remain behind even in high school." Melanie Pritchett, TEA associate commissioner for statewide initiatives, agreed that reading may not have been emphasized enough to current high schoolers. Recent test scores prove that. "Absolutely, a large part of the problem with high schools is reading comprehension,"...

YOUNG, BLACK AND ON TRACK How mentoring can help African-American boys succeed BEN GRAY / Staff Benjamin Brisbane: Senior, Shiloh High School. GPA: 3.8. Plays violin, keyboards and drums; sings and dances; will major in music education. Brandon Cooke: Sophomore, Morehouse College. GPA: 3.4. Psychology major, hopes to work in law enforcement or in U.S. intelligence. Tavares Stephens: English teacher at Morrow High School, mentor to young black men, worked with each of these students. William Findley Jr.: Freshman, Morehouse. Graduated high school at 16. GPA: 3.5. Licensed pilot; aeronautical engineering major; aspires to be a commercial aviator. Babatunde Balogun:...

Congressman Fattah Challenges Findings of National Report on Urban Student Performance 7/22/03 4:31:00 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk Contact: Debra Anderson for Congressman Chaka Fattah, 202-225-4001 WASHINGTON, July 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Citing resources and not ability, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) criticizes a report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress that shows students in Atlanta, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Houston, Los Angeles and New York City lag behind their peers in reading and writing. "Students in the six large cities and all other large urban areas have by every definition the least qualified teachers, the most over-crowded...

In last week's U.S. Supreme Court's affirmative action decision, Justice Clarence Thomas' dissent included a quotation from an 1865 speech by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "What I ask for the Negro," Douglass said, "is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. ... All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... Your interference is doing him positive injury." Forget how the majority used the phrase "compelling state interest" to trump the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal treatment under the law and give continued sanction to racial discrimination. Let's examine some...

Monday, June 09, 2003 WASHINGTON — Head Start (search) classes are designed to help prepare pre-schoolers for elementary schools, but a new study says that progress comes at a great cost and the results are not as high as supporters hoped. "While making some progress, Head Start is not doing enough to enhance the language, pre-reading, and pre-mathematics knowledge and skills that we know are important for school readiness ... Children continue to lag behind national norms when they exit Head Start," the Health and Human Services Department (search) report reads. The report said children who graduated from Head Start...

It was May 2000, and the guy at Al Gore’s polling firm seemed baffled. A Yale political-science major, I’d already walked away from a high-paying consulting job a few weeks earlier, and now I was walking away from a job working on a presidential campaign to do . . . what? Well, when push came to shove, I didn’t want to devote my life to helping the rich get richer or crunching numbers to see what views were most popular for the vice president to adopt. This wasn’t what my 17 years of education were for. My doctor parents had...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lower-income African American children are less likely to aspire to better-paying and higher-status jobs, which many view as held mainly by white workers, according to a new study that looks at children's perceptions of race and occupations. Middle-class black children also associated higher status jobs with white people but were more likely to want those jobs, said the study, to be published in the May issue of Developmental Psychology. "Socioecononic status makes a difference," said Pennsylvania State University professor Lynn Liben, one of the study's authors. The study examined 92 black first- and sixth-graders from a racially...

Since the myriad of diversity and tolerance organizations tell me that black stereotypes are merely vestiges of America’s racist past and do not exist, then I must be, like the speaker in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” delusional, seeing things daily that clearly are not there. I began teaching in the 87 percent black Memphis City Schools in 1991, logging time at a south Memphis middle school and my current post at Westside High School in the Frayser section of the city. From my first day in the classroom in October 1991, I have seen behavior that is intolerable at...

(New Britain-AP, May 19, 2003 Updated 7:15 AM) _ Educators in New Britain are developing a plan to train students for careers in homeland security. The Herald of New Britain reports that the school district is creating a federal proposal to open a homeland security high school. The school would be for at-risk students, and have a military-style teaching environment to teach kids discipline. Superintendent Doris Kurtz tells the newspaper that the program will be launched in some form this fall. Between 50 and 100 students are expected to participate.

The group consisted of men and women, blacks, whites and Latinos. Some were educators, while others called themselves interested residents and community organizers. As they sat around a table in a Durham School of the Arts classroom, the participants in a workshop on minority student achievement tried to make sense of why black boys often lag behind their peers in the classroom. One woman said young black males lack decent role models, and some children simply decide to "opt out" of education early in life. Parents with children who struggle in school have often felt isolated, and have been reluctant...

<p>It has been 20 years since "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report on education in America, concluded that the "intellectual, moral and spiritual strength of our people" were threatened by a failing education system.</p> <p>The report recommended better-educated and -qualified teachers, regularly assessing teacher and student performance, and performance pay for better teachers. It also proposed a much stronger curriculum, particularly in math and English.</p>

Naked City Covering The Bases Some shockingly savvy private-school girls on the sexual politics of hooking up, getting and giving pleasure, and parents who are too hip. By Amy Sohn Nell and Cara are 14-year-old freshmen at a private Manhattan high school, and as I sit down for coffee with them, I am chagrined to find we are wearing exactly the same brands. “Is your watch Red Monkey?” asks Cara, who has a goofy smile and silky brown hair, grabbing my wrist. “So’s mine!” She raises her arm next to mine like we’re Wonder Twins. I notice that Cara’s best...

<p>THE NUMBER of African-Americans under 18 living in extreme poverty is at its highest level since the federal government began keeping records 23 years ago. This disturbing news from the Children's Defense Fund comes as budget shortfalls have forced many state governments to change their policies to make welfare checks and child care subsidies more difficult to get.</p>

10 May, 2003 Summit on black pupils' results 'crisis' Black Caribbean pupils did worse than other black students A conference is taking place in London to examine the reasons why black pupils, on average, do not perform as well as children from other ethnic groups. Black children of Caribbean origin achieved the worst results in GCSE exams in England last summer. Speakers at Saturday's conference include the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the Education Minister, Stephen Twigg. Mr Phillips said children from Afro-Caribbean families were failing to reach their potential. We're facing a serious and...

<p>The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."</p>