The writing of observations of the various target children and their families are very useful reads. It illustrates (to me) what a difficult/impossible job an urban teacher will have combining children from the various different socioeconomic groups into one classroom.

And the differences intensify after puberty. These children researched here appear to be late prepubescent or early pubescent – so the real fat isn’t in the fire yet. That’s where the cognitive differences become more extreme. I do see that she addresses the advantages and the disadvantages of the upbringing of both white and black low class and middle class kiddies. It should be noted that there are some areas of functioning where the higher class kids are not at an advantage – and vice versa.

Which is reasonable enough. It’s not all doom and gloom for the lower class. Teachers would probably enjoy the book. As far as what to do with the insight and research material, who can say?

If you drop an upper class child into the ghetto they are going to have problems and will leave. If you drop a ghetto child into Bel Air they are going to freak and will leave. Either way you have problems and if they assimilate into the new reality (not likely) they are going to have further problems when they return to their natal society.

So what does OUSD tell it’s new teachers when the arrive at, say Castlemont? Should a school district teach the students in (the style of) their native “culture” or try to move them into a middle class/professional class way of being?

This is where I go back to the idea of different schools for different folks using self-selection rather than the sorting hat. In other words, segregated schools. Except the segregated schools are to feed into occupations. And noncompliance at any district school would result in Fs with little mercy.

Kind of like 1960.

OUSD and the other urban schools apparently have some other plan which is to produce better more productive lives for the urban school children. Los Angeles Unified, OUSD, SF-USD and the like.

Fred Reed has been writing for years now commenting on Urban Racial Issues among other things. His description of urban youth is what I’m worried about:

http://www.fredoneverything.net/LondonRiots.shtml

Good public schools would avoid these problems. Reed and others believe we are headed for very bad times ala Katrina conditions in the cities. These problems are what the USA public schools were to have prevented.

Brave New World.

Middle Schools need more structure, somewhere in between Elementary School and what they have now.

And I was very surprised to read in a previous posting how Board Member Tadashi and some supporters here want to gut Middle School after school programs in favor of High Schools. Gee, I wonder if that will make them more prepared?

Jim Mordecai

O-High, Skyline and Tech are pushing College Prep coursework. That is going to be very difficult for those students arriving at these campuses, without the requisite skills to succeed.

Students below grade level should be barred from real schools and referred to remediation programs or to alternative schools for life skills & basic skills. These students would (perhaps) not be on a graduation track but rather a job skills track and there’d be no apologies for this. If they caught up through summer school and extra work & retesting they could rejoin their regular cohort.

OUSD’s unwillingness to do this is why no one trusts their “education”. And we can talk about Atlanta and DC schools the same way. Their school administrations obviously thought they could just cheat forever and people would be fooled by the too-good-to-be-true test scores.