Sorry to vent, we’ve tried this be-nice-to-the-black-folks nonsense for decades and things only get worse. My Grandparents, Great-Grandparents and other relatives ran black primary, secondary and college public schools and classrooms for generations before integration ruined the party they had going for them. Their methods of teaching and running schools lifted their students out of the fields and the slums. If they saw how the urban schools are run today they’d be saying “No Wonder you are having problems”…

I never heard them once say they couldn’t teach one of their kids because the slattern of a mother wouldn’t support the school. They took the kids as they found them and managed them regardless of the family problems. If they could help, fine. But it was not essential to fix a bad home in order teach basics.

No. We don’t require the parents of black kids to do anything. They can be a bad as they want to. The school is charged with dealing with their products as they find them, not on some imaginary plane of preparedness by Ozzie and Harriett. If they had great parents they’d not be in black schools.

The schools in the slums of St Louis, New York and Chicago in 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950 and 1960 did better than Los Angeles and Oakland do today. They didn’t whine that every school failure was the fault of the parents then. The parents then were slum dwellers, single mothers, field hands from the south, and on and on. The reason the urban public schools exist is to take the products of the slums and make them something much more than the parents they came from.

That’s not a hard concept. It starts with the public realization that the parent’s have (typically) no accomplishment themselves and are in no position to educate their products. So you don’t need to hear about what the parents like or what they want. It really doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. The job of these urban public schools is to provide social and economic mobility for the students that their ghetto parents cannot.

That means teaching the kiddies not to be ghetto, how to think, walk and talk. And yes, it means teaching them that their parents are bad (one way of saying “Limited”) and not to be like them, to be better than them. Or at least to have that opportunity. You can lead a horse to water and if it won’t drink it’s a bad horse.

It’s the refusal nowadays to follow time tested policy in urban education that gives us unemployable products. I argue that the little black kids now are no more unmanageable than the black kids of 1940 despite the current excess of single mothers.

Things would improve fast if we got rid of Pacification, got in their (the students’) faces until the behavior changed, and segregated the school campuses based on deportment and performance. It would also be safer and more pleasant for the workers to work in – the only group who’s comfort I care about.

It’s nice if the parents are good for something but that is optional in a public school.

Listen to Mr.Wright, and you will hear him state what is being “done to” black children or how black kids are not “being educated”. What Mr.Wright has never learned or understood in his 80+ years is that education, and success are not a passive endeavor, and that parents and their children must embrace it, and nurture it within themselves. We must learn to do for ourselves or the government will do everything for us and to us. These kids are not incapable, they are very capable(most of the population is average IQ and perfectly capable of meaningful work) and just require examples of how to live their lives. Parents need to step up and do that.

I rather doubt students there are kept around if the curse and threaten the teachers – or each other.

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-private-schools-2012-9

In Oakland you have Head-Royce:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Royce_School

Public schools were created to promote social and economic mobility and to take trash kids beyond what their trash parents were. Teachers told the parent(s) how it was going to be not the other way around. And they didn’t bother about parental permission for much of anything. They WERE in place of parents. The ghettos of the early 20th Century were just as bad as the worse now. But those public school by and large lifted generations of people out of the gutters. Ours don’t try. We don’t tell these kids right and wrong and how to be. We tell them that all “cultures” are as good as Western Civ and that they can do whatever they want. That is bad teaching.

This all becomes so much simple if we stop worrying about what the parents want. If they were any good their kids would go to better schools.

The public schools should be run to do what needs to be done, and to let the parents get on with their working for a living. The schools are here to teach Otis and Latifah how to read and write, how to stay out of prison and the graveyards – to live well, and how to make a (nice??) living in the Brave New World. If the parent’s have a lot of wishes they need to take them to private and church schools.

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/19/4833079/state-flags-4-sacramento-area.html

I agree that the proposed 5-year “Voluntary Resolution Plan” means less resources for kids (all kids no matter what group enrolled in OUSD) in the classroom.

It is progressive Russlynn Ali pushing the Board into how it will spend its budget for the next five years.

Strange, but on this issue I find myself a conservative, wanting to maintain local power over discipline issues.

Jim Mordecai