Reply to This American Life about desegregation in schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers,  no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used,  a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since,  an antiquated science lab (only in high school),  33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on.  There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home,  and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions,  of course it's a recipe for failure.  Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come?  If the students are performing at high levels,  they will come.[/quote]

I went to school in Soviet Russia.  We were poor.  I had one uniform I would wear all year long.  Shoes were a birthday present.  We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers.  We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture.  Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest.  We did not have a playground, no labs,  no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls.  Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher.  Some teachers were terrible.  Homework took hours.  Yet we didn't have a single drop out.  All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst.  My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable.  Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse.  She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country.  I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started.  She was always hungry and sleep deprived.  She finished college.  So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.[/quote]

+1 Thank you for writing this so I didnt have to.  Except I think I was next generation, as I only went to soviet school through elementary and than to whatever was left of the school system in crumbling country school. Similar experiences for my parents/grandparents.[/quote]

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