And even through grade school and public high school, poor academic performance would result in expulsion. If you didn’t fit in you were sent elsewhere where you would fit in. This is what is needed in these “schools”.

Our urban public schools are making sure they don’t get that opportunity by teaching them in ways that ensure they are unable to pass into middle class/upper class society at all, including as employees – or even as customers. It starts by not teaching standard english, then finishes by not teaching such mores as honesty and fair play, modesty and boundries, and respect for authority. Yes, it really is the school’s job to teach these things. Even worse the urban public schools teach their opposites – Bad grammar and vocabulary, promiscuity, lying, cheating and stealing, attention seeking and roughshodding, and lewdness.

I’m not saying the teachers publish a course catalog in all this but the products of these schools are well schooled in such by the time they drop out or “graduate” as uneducated people.

One of the nice things about the Catholic education is that regardless of how poor you were, and we did have poor students – everybody knew the rules and when they wanted something (or didn’t want to get punished) could be on their best behavior and pass as well turned out kids. Even if they weren’t. Our public school products just can’t pass. Starting with the telephone test.

So they don’t get pass the velvet rope in life. Not like they should be able to. If they only went to better schools.

I’ve been following online comments in national postings about the findings of this Civil Rights Project report. One of the most insightful I’ve encountered made the point that what should be followed more than racial/ethnic segregation is socioeconomic segregation. I tend to agree with that.

Normally, I stick to defending my arguments with objective facts dug up from DataQuest, or from research by others. But in this case I will also argue against allowing any trend which increases socioeconomic segregation for subjective, very personal reasons.

I was a child who had an extremely unstable childhood. I grew up in a household with a very young, multiply-divorcing, struggling single mother who didn’t have the support of either of her own parents. She grew up under circumstances fairly similar to those of OUSD’s most dysfunctional kids. My father was nearly absentee, and lived in another state. Both my parents were working class; neither had attended college. Since both were single children, the extended family was negligible.

Fortunately, I ended up living in a town with socioeconomically integrated secondary schools and was able to make friends with kids who had things like fathers and stable home lives. They were upper middle-class and lived in nicely furnished, three-story houses. They regularly went to summer camp and on expensive family vacations, and eventually to private colleges. For some reason or they other they accepted me, so I was able to get an firsthand look into their family lives. One time I was served tomato aspic at my friend’s farewell to boarding school. Another time I was corrected on how to use my spoon with soup.

During that time I was acutely aware of our class differences, and digested the information about their lives thinking I might be able to use it as some sort of model for what my future life might be. I believe my personal socioeconomic status was raised a notch or two because of what I learned by experiencing a socioeconomically integrated environment. I’d like to see more, not fewer, kids get a similar opportunity.

Are the benchmark tests part of the students’ grade? I have heard from several students that when standardized tests are not part of the students’ individual grades, a certain percentage of them essentially opt out by filling in bubbles at random and the like. Whether this is a cover-up excuse for doing poorly, I do not know.

Huge numbers of jobs are going and they’re not coming back. Depression level living ahead.

The drastic shift in budgets are producing shifts in behavior of merchants and people in general (try writing a check nowadays). These changes will greatly affect the uneducated and unhousebroken first. If the urban minority (largely single mother/polygamous father/broken home kids) don’t get the required civics & social training in school they are going to see lifelong reductions in earnings and quality of life.

When the government stops providing controls (budget cuts in law enforcement, prisons and parole) individuals will quickly act to protect themselves by limiting interaction with “others”.

This thread is on Charters. I have said I think the Charters are here to destroy the public schools and break their unions. For some reason I disagree with, the state has decided to let the Charters bleed out the publics rather than fix the publics. In so doing they are setting up a system where society segregates itself into self contained associations starting at age 5, never the twain to meet. Some shop at Costco and some shop at Wal*Mart. Everything different right down to the language spoken.

Someone needs to take a stand that the publics must be fixed and restored to the standards we had in mid 20th Century. Too many Charters eliminates the common denominator in our population. The Charters are so different from each other and the publics they do serve as different “languages”. We won’t make it as a society if we balkanize so much.

I wrote about my experience on an email list serve. It takes in Lacy’s point – but it may also address some of what Nextset has been saying.

Those who know me know that I am often critical of many, many things in OUSD. But I would like to talk for a moment about something – I am not saying that there is a solution for what I am going to mention, and I am certainly not going to tell you that this is happening in every Oakland public school classroom because it is not. But I want to talk about something that I am so incredibly frustrated with that I am fuming, at myself, at our society, at the district, at some parents – oh, hell today I am frustrated with the world about it.

I am working toward my teaching credential. I have passed the CSET and earn high math scores on the exam. I am taking a “Teaching Elementary Students Mathematics” course at Holy Names University and I voluntarily work with a group of students in math who are in fourth and fifth grade in an Oakland public school. These students VOLUNTARILY come to the morning class from 7:30 AM – 8:30 AM to get the extra help they need. Their benchmark tests are at about 50%. Meaning they get half right and half wrong. And, that’s only half of the story.

If these same students are given one problem on a paper – the SAME EXACT problem they missed on the benchmark test. They solve the problem and give the answer with 100% of the time – or very close to 100% of the time. And, when solving, unlike the benchmark test, there is no multiple choice. So, I think maybe someone helped them. I ask them to explain their calculations and why they think their calculations are right. They verbally explain the answers to me, the steps they took to get to the answers, and the general “formula” or “rule” that makes it so. For example, “I know that the angles of a triangle must add up to 180 degrees. So I subtract the side that I am given from 180. Then I know that because there is a square in the corner, that means 90 degrees, so I subtract 90 degrees and I get 47 degrees. Wasn’t that right?” Well, of course it’s right. Yet, for the SAME EXACT problem on the test, worded in the same exact way, they marked 90 degrees.

We’ve gone over test taking techniques; we’ve used the cross off the obviously wrong answers; we’ve talked about working the problem right there in the test book, looking at only one problem at a time.

So I ask the students if they know the material – yes, they do. They are happy to show me. But when the high stakes test comes something happens. Today, we did no calculations, we just talked. Why do you think that you are not able to show what you know on the tests? I ask, here are some of the responses: I always mess up on tests. All my other teachers said I was bad in math so I guess I am really bad in math. I see all the questions and I just flip out. I see all of the problems and think I will run out of time. I see all of the problems and I pick the hard ones first and I get stuck and don’t have time for no more problems. What is math good for anyway? I see four answers and I just pick one. And the comments go on and on.

So, I am not offering up excuses. I am not offering up solutions. I am telling you that these kids know the math on that test and if you came in and asked each student to show you his or her work on the white board, the problem presented just as written on the test, nearly every child in my group of 14 would calculate the answer and put a box around it.

Thanks for taking the time to read – it’s all about so much more than I understand right now.

Whether or not a good school and a good teacher turns a student into a star is just not dependent on whether the parent of the moment is a full participant. Sorry. You can’t blame it all on the parent in the home, for good or for bad.

A kid can be a good or bad student based on genetics. yes. Genetics. Not always but sometimes the kid is cursed or is lucky and they have the right hormone balance and IQ to be really go and certain coursework. Or really Antisocial Personality Disordered (strong belief in professional circles that is genetically involved although the traits can be induced as attachment disorder also).

The schools have interesting students floating up on their shores sometimes especially the public schools in a large geographic area. It is not always the parents, heck, lots of kids are being reaised by step parents and other relatives also.

The trick is for the school to sort the kids and to place the right kids in the right programs which certainly not one campus fits all lowest denominator rules.

It is not always the teachers fault what is happening to the kids and it is not always the teachers doing that kids do well either. They just show up that way sometimes. Sometimes it really is “value added” by the teachers. Good schools add value and I don’t think OUSD is allowed to field good schools. It’s not politically correct for OUSD and large urban school districts to run good schools because if they did the chillun would be unhappy and so would a lot of the bio parents because their kids would have to tow the line or get punitive-feeling transfers and administrators would go nose to nose with all of them telling them they don’t measure up. OUSD doesn’t ever want to have to tell a lot of folks, especially black folks, that they don’t measure up and are getting cut from supposedly desirable programs.

Well they need to. Because no one will ever change their ways unless they are faced with losing something they want. As long as “civil rights” is used to block minorities (and let’s face it, it’s minority performance failure we are dealing with) from consequences of bad behavior nothing will improve.