Like it or not taxpayers cannot make the world more fair and equal for these kids, the parents bear full responsibility for bringing the kids into the difficult situations that they face. There is another agenda here, Jerry has plans for that money(don’t you just love it when someone who lives off your tax money proceeds to re-distribute it at his whim)?

I would similarly challenge Michelle Rhee to return full-time and permanently to the PUBLIC SCHOOL classroom at regular pay and tenure status, and make her working conditions the learning environment of perhaps thirty kids from the toughest areas of Detroit or Gary Indiana.

Where the proverbial rubber meets the road, we’ll then be enabled to use IMPACT to evaluate what she has wrought, and assess pupils’ further needs.

To the extent she has used her self-promoting road show to focus discussion and centralize debate on this subject, she has misled parents and educational reformers. At worst, unions from time to time have supported non-performance as a part of the status quo, maintaining tenure for demoralized and/or low skill teachers kept in place by administrators using tenure rules who don’t want to rock a community’s boat.

The central issue is motivation and helping parents create a family,home and school environment that fosters learning, motivation, and presents resources for learning achievement and advancement. Consistent, fair, rational discipline balanced with adequate recreational play and leisure opportunities surely must be apart of the formula.

All kids are educable, though there is measurable variation in learning capability and retention. All people similarly have capacity to be imaginative and creative. Measurement of objective aspectsoflearning performance is important, since it helps us assess and evaluate needs and performance, progress, and deficits or further challenges versus accredited performance benchmarks.

In Rhee’s “Rheevolution,” there is excessive and extreme reliance on standardized test scores,on tests and methods developed by self-serving organizations interested in product and service sales rather than students. Too much anecdotal evidence and strategy is taken in from funding sources who lack expertise in education though they may have the best intentions.

Though she is a registered Democrat, she dismisses the significance of any politics in educational matters.

There is excessive almost dehumanizing regimentation, standardization, and pseudo-competition. Though she extolls herself as the best friend of the urban and rural poor in their quest for educational excellence for their children, she fails to identify and implement the models that MEASUREABLY best provide it: Sidell Friends, and Harlem Childrens’ Zone.

So, now, she has brought her “Rhamblin’ Shamblin’ Rhoad Show” to Oakland. Be certain it includes an assortment of spectacles calculated to infuriate and shock, to titiliate and tempt. Also expect she will not explain those test scores being investigated in her last salaried position back east.

Finally,expect she will shed no light on any of the schools that are the embodiment of the standards she should be focusing the dialogue upon. To please her bipartisan moneyed old school tie sponsors, she will focus everything on resentment against allegedly lavish teacher pay and benefits (rather than on overpaid administrators and consultants and wasteful charter schools), on Draconian discipline, on nineteenth century myths of education.

So while the pupils (and families) blessed with access to the standards and learning resources and environments sustained at places like Sidell Friends and HCZ continue to excel and progress towards Ivy League opportunities, the rest of us are relegated to prefab education factories run by the leather booted Mistress of Firm But Decisive discipline? I hope and pray not.

Blame it on the same corrupt educational system that pays crappy teachers just as much as great teachers(more the unions fault than anything), how fair is that?

LAUSD is one of the worst school districts in the country, and yet they are one of the best funded, and to add insult to injury, every single Californian who pays taxes(all 50% of us) also pay off the interest(matching dollar for dollar) on their massive bonds which are in the billions. Neat huh?

http://www.fulldisclosure.net/Blogs/59.php

Only required to check 3% of applications.

http://www.joannejacobs.com/2011/07/nj-auditor-free-lunch-errors-skew-aid/

http://www.blackinformant.com/uncategorized/taking-a-closer-look-school-lunch-program

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/01/04/retired-chicago-teachers-improperly-collected-over-1-million-report/

http://www.netnebraska.org/extras/statewide/pers/lunch.html

1. Subsidize lunches for already massively subsidized people.

2. Districts get extra taxpayer money if a certain percentage of the population is on (FRLP).

This program could be unnecessarily wasting billions of dollars each year on multiple programs that use FRLP to determine poverty.

http://educationnext.org/fraud-in-the-lunchroom/

Everyone should look into this, and post all relevant data and findings.

Poverty also has nothing to do with Rape, Armed Robbery and Murder.

Really.

Those who want to circulate that drivel are those who want to accomodate anti-socials. I don’t accomodate these people. Known too many of them.

I’ve also know and known of way too many “poor” people who behaved and guess what – they didn’t end up poor. We are still seeing this with “poor” immigrants. Now the 2nd generation immigrants are a different issue. Once they get “Americanized” in bad public schools and have the government interfere with parental discipline you do see bad behavior creep in. And the bad is different for the boys and the girls.

I refer you to Banfield’s “The Unheavenly City”. Best thing I ever read while at UC Berkeley. Jack-booted Law Enforcement works in controling lower class bad behavior that if left unchecked will turn a city into – Detroit… Oakland’s Mayor really needs to read Banfield. It would help her be be less “confused” all the time. She wonders why all her appeasement isn’t helping things. Banfield explains – and recounts – that any appeasement of anti-socials makes them worse. The way to have a city that works and is safe is to have absolutely no appeasement of criminals. As for the students acting like criminals – it’s the same thing exactly. You just remove them from the scene (normal schools), permanently. And those who remain can have a civilized school.

Back to Rhee. I tend to agree with some of her critics that she is either an opportunist or is being used to dump on the teachers while at the same time holding the “chillun” sacrosanct. As a result you get wholesale cheating by teachers and staff (guaranteed by NCLB anyway) with no real improvement in ghetto schools.

So although I find her an interesting personality I unfortunately have to conclude she bodes us – no real improvement in ghetto schools.

The only way to turn ghetto schools into real schools is to cull the herd of bad students even before you cull the bad teachers. The bad students are a far bigger problem. No one wants to say it because they are too PC – and are willing to run the schools off a cliff rather than to say a discouraging word.

Michelle Rhee is correct, the schools are failing- not all the schools, but many of the urban ones, like Oakland’s. This should not be controversial. No Nextset we cannot go back to “the good old days ” of your youth, as the Black family structure is no longer there. but we can find bits and pieces of what works and cobble together a successful system. This will take political will and an alliance with the unions. So far, it is a no go. How long can unions stonewall?

I don’t buy the argument that teachers are excused from high standards because of poverty, and I am impressed by the statistics posted here that the below proficient rate is FOUR times higher than the poverty rate. Teachers take their students as they find them- in poverty, with family problems, or learning deficiencies. That is part of the gig. Do firemen complain about fires?

Rhee was on the right track. Raise teacher pay in a tradeoff for higher teaching standards (and fire the slackers) Pay the high performers more, and use teachers (not consultants) to teach other teachers. Even if you don’t like it, it’s going to happen.

I’m not saying we march failing kids to a firing squad. I believe that’s what you would like to point out.

Re-read my stories of what a real school was like. Screwed up or failing children were expelled or encouraged to transfer to Continuation School. That’s where the social workers and vocational counselors were. They were not in my normal school.

Continuation School is where the handholding and social services work to keep the children who could not function in a normal school from going to prison (or a state hospital). I worked in one of these schools on occasion when I was briefly a sub teacher during the Bar Exam. I have a grad student friend now who works occasionally in a locked juvenile facility in the Bay Area. Other friends and relatives have worked Special Ed and Special Needs schools. The failure children need services and can be trained and programmed – just not in a normal school. You cannot have a good school – one that my family would be willing to put a child into with professional aspirations – also running a corp of delinquents and non-functioning kids.

The complete unwillingness of OUSD to terminate failing students – doubtless due to racial reasons – creates madhouses that are unfair to both students and staff. When you won’t fail anyone you can’t run a real school.

And it’s the Black schools who have to live like this. Good White Schools don’t tolerate crazy.

OUSD needs to run separate campuses for functioning and disfunctioning students and keep them physically separated. SF does this with Lowell High. This way even Black Students have a chance to go to a real school – one that doesn’t force them to accept failures as normal.

You may wish to perpetuate the current policy – wonder why? White students and high functioning minorities certainly will not go as the demographics of OUSD clearly show. So exactly who are you protecting – or helping. There is also the point that lower order students are harmed by keeping them with higher functioning students. They are different and do best when they are trained for what they do best which is not exactly Calculus. Running them alongside brighter students creates frustration and rage.