01-26-2004, 07:53 AM
There are many points in this thread that made me think. Affirmative Action tries to help disadantaged folks by getting them into highter education but we seem to not care about dooming them to inferiority for the first 17 years. I mean seriously, if we were to give extra funding to schools that perform well, can't we see the obvious consequence? Which school is going to do better? The school in a upper middle class where parents can afford tutors or a school in a working class area where walking to school might be dangerous. Isn't it obvious which school we should be looking after more. Instead of making some half-assed effort to make up for the disadvantges poor students go through because they had crappy conditions, how improving those conditions? Can anyone expect kids to magicaly succeed when they've been given substandard education for so long?
You are right on target here. But it's not an easy thing to solve by any means. Even if you make that ghetto school have a teacher for every ten kids, state of the art buildings, new books every year, and a computer lab for every class, how can you make up for the kids not having any help at home because they have single working parents, or kids (and sometimes teachers) who have to worry more about gang activity than course work, or entire classes full of kids who just don't care about their education? Funding the schools is something that can be done with help from the outside, but some of these issues will have to be addressed from within the community.
Sometimes the opportunity is there, and people just aren't prepared to accept it. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center apparently because a large group of passengers did not stand up to a few thugs with box cutters. I think some urban problems are similar. There are many opportunities available, certainly much more so than 40 years ago, but it requires focus and leadership from within those specific communities. The kind of focus and energy that once was there to fight discrimination, I think may need to be renewed to fight more internal problems like gangs, drugs, and working as a community to help kids get that education. Either that, or it will just be up to the kids to grab their bootstraps and work themselves out of the ghetto and into college. And if they are able to use that education to contribute back to the old community in some way, all the better.
You are right on target here. But it's not an easy thing to solve by any means. Even if you make that ghetto school have a teacher for every ten kids, state of the art buildings, new books every year, and a computer lab for every class, how can you make up for the kids not having any help at home because they have single working parents, or kids (and sometimes teachers) who have to worry more about gang activity than course work, or entire classes full of kids who just don't care about their education? Funding the schools is something that can be done with help from the outside, but some of these issues will have to be addressed from within the community.
Sometimes the opportunity is there, and people just aren't prepared to accept it. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center apparently because a large group of passengers did not stand up to a few thugs with box cutters. I think some urban problems are similar. There are many opportunities available, certainly much more so than 40 years ago, but it requires focus and leadership from within those specific communities. The kind of focus and energy that once was there to fight discrimination, I think may need to be renewed to fight more internal problems like gangs, drugs, and working as a community to help kids get that education. Either that, or it will just be up to the kids to grab their bootstraps and work themselves out of the ghetto and into college. And if they are able to use that education to contribute back to the old community in some way, all the better.