I like the thought and would love to see my people held to a similar standard but this is American land of the free and home of the excuse.

Sobrante park was the schoole where parenst shoved the principal , a few years back, and the principal was almost fired for defending himself!

There lies a huge proble.

These parents ain going to get it for the most part, its all the luck of the kid.

By the way, Black schools got worse after Brown vs Board of Ed. Blacks were tough on their own kind, whited devloped guilt . In actuality, the case gave birth to this tolerant acceptance, achivement Gap and aceptance of failure.

turner

Virtually all the families I know undergo sterilization of one spouse when they reach their limit of children. I do not believe welfare recipients have any right to refuse it and still leech off the taxpayers. And I do not believe a child has a right to bear a child or to be sexually active. These are school policy issues to the extent that schoolchildren who do should not be allowed around the normal kids.

But as far as the schools go, OUSD and the like are in no position to make over the parents. They are what they are. The schools must concentrate on the kids in the buildings. Those kids who are ready willing and able to do the work should be attended to in schools for them. Those kids who can’t/won’t do the work for whatever reason need to be in other schools where reasonable efforts are made to help them change. Reasonable efforts do not include spending double the amount of money on them, physical combat, or subjecting school staff to abuse or harm. We should do what we reasonably can to get the impaired kids into a job ladder and then wave them goodby.

And stop worrying about fixing the families – at least in the typical public schools. Schools are not here to work on anyone other than the enrolled students. Parents who don’t speak English are not a problem. We dealt with that on a large scale a century ago.

We seem to say, well at least they’re in class most of the time. It’s a start. And then when these men and women can’t read in high school, ill-equipped parents who have not made sure their sons and daughters were in school expect us to tutor them for two or three years to make of for 10 years of missed education.

Since when did we decide that a low bar was better than a high one? Since when did it become okay to allow children to come onto school grounds if they are suspended – isn’t there an evening custodian? And, since when was it okay to suspend a student rather than making the child’s mother and father or guardian come and sit in the classroom with the child for all of the three days of “suspension?”

Being a parent is a responsibility, it is not a fundamental right. There was a woman in the Central Valley who was offering teen girls $250 if they would go on long term birth control (IUD or Norplant) which provides birth control up to five years. She had a $10,000 fund of her own money to reduce teen parenthood, thus reducing the number of kids in the system. She had personally adopted 3 or 4 kids out of the system.

As a tax payer, I would support an annual bonus to parents on financial assistance who got their kids to school on time every school day, no excuses. I understand the problems that most of the parents at Sobrante Park have with executive functioning – long term goals, able to research the steps needed to get their kids into college, able to plan their money over the entire month, making 7:30 dentist appointments so their children arrive on time to school at 8:30, but these are the requirements of a parent. Not just a good parent, but a parent. Also, the majority of the parents speak little or no English.

I clearly understand that people come to America to find a better life. However, when you choose to live here, you must abide by the laws of the land. Those laws including getting your kids to school, ready to learn. If the parents can’t perform these tasks they need to attend parenting classes and ask for the education they need to become good parents, or be willing to let someone else raise their children while going on long term birth control to avoid having more children they are incapable of raising with societal norms.

It is really frustrating to support schools and parents who are not invested in educating their current children while feeling they have the RIGHT to have more children they will not be able to care for either. When, as a society are we allowed to say “enough” to someone who is a bad parent?

“Educators” have used the Brown case to refuse to set and maintain standards in various programs and to allow entire districts to crash and burn. Brown doesn’t require this at all. Brown certainly didn’t create a problem for Oakland Tech/UC Berkeley’s Demonstration High Schoolo Summer Program from strictly imposing prerequisites on applicants for it’s classes or from flunking out anyone who has an attendance problem or can’t do the work. Yes this has a racially disparate result – at the moment at least. Racially disparate results are not a problem when objective standards are followed.

As far as your 10 year old firebug – well this society is so busy not maintaining standards of any kind in places such as the schools that special needs kids – and neglected/abused kids – are not identified and provided services/referral up to and including institutionialization. Some of the bad behavior we ignore and accept as “culture”. What’s really going on here is the devaluation on people, especially blacks, who are not supposed to be held to any kind of objective standards because we don’t want to fight with them or their people.

And the first people responsible for this abdication of responsibility are white liberals. There was a time when public school teachers looked and thought more like Bill Cosby, not Jane Fonda.

The injection of my world view probably gets shrill. Can’t help that – the ongoing damage being done to people who only have a short number of years to learn the lifeskills to support themselves is pretty gross. The difference between the conduct of real schools and the ghetto schools is pretty stark. I am old enough to remember what things were like in public schools before this rot set it. My relatives taught in some of them – attended some of the all-black urban schools also before 1960. Maybe it’s just that my parents and all their friends were once in the Armed Services. Maybe we are just not used to (even now) the wholesale discarding of black children to thug culture.

I often say that some people will be OK no matter what the government schools do because they are smart enough in their own society to take care of themselves. Some people tend to be much less so. The Public Schools are not here for the upper class. OUSD are similar schools are here to establish a floor below which the town’s kids should be falling below. That floor is underwater and the drop out kids were not serviced at all. The “graduates” of OUSD are not being sufficiently trained. OUSD needs to change it’s program – or the Charters will pick off so many there won’t be much of a school left. OUSD needs to out-Charter the Charters.