At each of those roughly 75 schools, they could make up a relatively small percentage (but not too small) of the student body and still be considered a “significant subgroup” under NCLB.

Questions on which kids are learning just chk the AYP’s for the schools.

While lower class cannot be transformed into what they are not, you can train them to take some of the cutting edge off the present oriented behaviors. Pain and punishments are the best/most effective (only effective) method of doing that according to Banfield. This is because the lower class are present oriented, only immediate and relatively severe adverse consequences work in training that bunch. Our prole schools used to follow this. Now they don’t. So we have the elevated premature death, imprisonment & other bad results.

Our prole schools have done their best to insulate ghetto dwellers from immediate and severe consequences for any bad behavior. Thing is, when they get into the Brave New World they are roadkill. To the extent the Democratic Party and it’s rad-lib elites persist in protecting ghetto dwellers from consequences (welfare, liberal crime policy, cessation of public health controls) they turn minority neighborhoods and then the entire state into a jungle.

School policy is key to this entire problem – social mobility and having a decent society.

You are so right about the immediate gratification problem. We sure could fix that. Doing so would upset the pacification policy that is supreme in OUSD and similar schools. They just don’t want the chillun’ to be unhappy, miserable, stressed or scared. They are not the Nuns running the 1960′s Oakland Catholic Schools.

For example, teachers (and schools) who work with students of color and working class/poor students often have a daily reward system vs the high performing middle class or white attended schools who have monthly or trimester or semester based rewards systems.

Nearly every student I spoke to in poor and working class family has one or more “gaming” systems – Wii, X-Box, Nintendo DS, etc. whether or not they claim they can buy their child pencils or notebooks.

Over 3/4 of the students in high achieving schools have library cards and use them – nearly all of the the high performing schools have a library with a librarian in which the classes visit at least once per week. Libraries come before sports. In the low performing schools, they have sports programs that come before libraries and the libraries often have clerks that help students check out books, not someone experiences to teach students the systems the library uses of cataloging, sorting and filing books.

High performing schools teach about systems – solar system, transportation system, economic system, political system and so on. Low performing schools teach the planets, busses, trains, money, balancing a checkbook, democrats and republicans, but not about systems. In this way, the students in high performing schools look for systematic patterns from kindergarten on. In low performing schools there seems to be no link. So the reproductive system of plants, frogs and humans have nothing to do with one another. In high performing schools, students easily draw conclusions because they have learned the life cycles and systems.

I have given a lot of thought to what will help students succeed in school. And if I could name the primary factor, in my mind it would be the ability to delay gratification. Until students can restrain themselves when somebody is “messin’ with me” they will not be able to advance their education because their focus in not on looking at the big picture was seeing only what is immediately in front of them.

If Tony Smith works on one thing in his Oakland career it should be to grapple the problem of the immediate gratification issue. The boys I work with who are good at sports can tell you who was drafted from what college, but they cannot see that they will not be able to play professional sports themselves because they will not be able to pass the high school exit exam in 5 years if they are reading at a third grade level in 7th grade. They cannot see into high school, much less into college.

That is the difference in social class as well as in school performance.

http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/questions-sink-two-schwarzenegger-board-education-appointees

“…Those economic documents, along with Secretary of State business filings and other charter school records, show an interlocking series of business arrangements involving Lopez, his schools and a close associate, Ben Chavis of Oakland.

“In 2007, for example, both Lopez’s school, Oakland Charter High, and Chavis’ school, American Indian Public Charter School II, were approved by the Oakland school district to operate at 3800 Mountain Blvd.

“But neither went to Mountain Boulevard. Instead, both schools moved to an office building at 171 12th St., which was recently purchased for $7.4 million by Lumbee Properties LLC, a company founded and managed by Chavis. Shortly thereafter, Lopez started a property management firm, called Sun Management Group.

“By 2009, Lopez would report personally collecting between $10,000 to $100,000 in rent annually for holding a 13-year lease on the 171 12th St. property. It’s unclear why Lopez reported collecting rent on property owned by Chavis. Sun Management received another $10,000 to $100,000 from American Indian Public Charter School II, Chavis’ school located at the 171 12th St. property.”

I would really hate to see this blog become filled with postings for walkathons, magazine drives, etc… and those would at least be to benefit OUSD schools. #8 is soliciting for an organization that is not part of the Oakland Schools, even though many troops meet at school sites.

Those kind of postings are far more fitting for other types of blogs or Craigs List, but not this one.

If you are planning to have a Christmas wreath on your door this year, you can support these kids by buying your wreath from their Boy Scout Troop.

I set up a website for them to collect leads: http://www.BoyScoutXMAS.com

These kids are so busy doing homework and attended Saturday School that they have very limited time to go out and sell these wreaths. They have to sell at least 25 wreaths each or their parents have to cough up the money to cover it…

You don’t have to pay until the wreath is delivered on Dec 5th.

The wreaths are VERY high quality and reasonably priced.

If you have any questions, leave your email/phone on the site’s form and I will call/email you back personally.

Thanks!

http://www.BoyScountXMAS.com