Reply to RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!

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Reply to "RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Best part of the linked article:

"Rather than continue Rhee's reforms, the District should address health and other problems that lead to truancy..."

Love the hand-waving implicit in this line. Rather than provide an education system that might attract middle-class parents, we should take resources away from *teaching* and use it to fund public health initiatives and "other problems that lead to truancy". Good thinking, let's just zero out the school budget and spend it on substance abuse treatment, job training for adults, and other incredibly expensive initiatives. That's a recipe for increasing charter enrollment--and middle-class flight to the suburbs.[/quote]These are serious needs that would well serve lots of kids in the system right now.  If you think services should only go to the middle class, you have a very short sighted view of the needs of the entire city.  As a middle class resident it is in my interest that the poor kids get these services.  I'm tutoring a kid right now whose difficulty reading will make it difficult for her to hold a good job after high school.  In the meantime, her [b]charter school[/b] keeps taking her on college tours rather than returning my phone calls and emails asking to meet with someone so we could figure a way to best support so she can do something other than work at McDonald's after high school.  And given the structural changes in the job market, she is going to need to be able to do a whole lot more intellectually if she is going to do anything other than work as a cashier.

Unemployment among young people in DC is, last I heard, around 50%. Do you really think it's good for the city to have so many unemployed young people?  I live in a neighborhood where a lot of these unemployed young people are my neighbors.  It is not good for them or me to have them spending their days hanging out doing nothing.  So, yeah, bring on the job training.  I can think of a couple of basically good kids who can't read well or who are doing arithmetic using their fingers and who don't have parents who even know how to begin to teach them to look for a job and whose teachers at their glorified charter don't seem to be helping them all that much.  Those kids could really use some focused job training.  Neighborhood would be a whole lot better place if these good kids got some help getting employment.[/quote]

You've just explained in a nutshell why DCPS is going to suck as a school system until gentrification progresses much further than it already has. Unemployment among young people in DC is around 50% because we've pursued policies that ensure the poorest of the region's poor must live in the District. Fortunately that is changing. Hopefully in 5 years from now, unemployment among DC's young people will be around 20%.  And MD's (and VA's) will be similar.

So long as the purpose of all of the District's institutions is to remediate regional poverty, those institutions are going to suck at what they're nominally supposed to be doing.[/quote]

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