Re: before katrina

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Jerry Okamura wrote:


"Alvin E. Toda" <aet@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Pine.BSI.4.61.0609041151380.13566@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Islander wrote:

I wonder about cause and effect. Are people in poverty because they are not educated or are they not educated because they are poor? I suspect that both are true to some extent. For me, I grew up in the poverty produced by the great depression and it motivated me to *not* be poor. I was fortunate that my parents valued education and saw it as the path out of poverty. I also had the advantage of being white and of not growing up in urban blight. My parents might have been poor, but they were not discouraged.

I fear that the roots of poverty go much deeper than your proposed publicity program would solve. It wouldn't hurt, but I also think that it would not put a dent in the deep discouragement that results from the experience of generations of being poor. There is a good book on the experience of a woman who attempted to work at jobs that the poor might fill. It described the miserable conditions and discrimination at that level. I came away from it with the strong feeling that there needs to be something more than the "welfare to work" approach that presently leaves out two groups, those who are helplessly not able to work at the bottom, but more importantly, those who are now working in order to survive, but who see no path to a better life.

Finally, I think that we see a symptom of the problem in the many ways that hopeless people attempt to aspire to the shortcuts. Look at the increasing popularity of reality shows, highly paid sports figures, the various lotteries. The odds of winning in any of these is very small, but people are attracted to them because they have lost faith in any other way to get ahead. There has to be an obvious path and I think that you need to have that path established before you will convince anyone that education is all they need.

Jerry overlooks the difficulty of the problem. I think that specialists in dealing with these problems of students and their families, should be on the school staff. We need social workers in schools. Counselors can't do the job.

Would it be that difficult, if there was some consistent message that those in positions of power told us about day in and day out? Saying it is a difficult problem does not solve the problem. Trying to stop people from driving while drunk is a difficult problem Trying to stop people from smoking cigarettes is a difficult problem. Trying to stop people from using illegal drugs is a difficult problem. Yet government tries to convince us each and everyday not to do what is bad for us.

With limited success. Such advertising doesn't seem to me to cause much individual change. But it does charge up the general public and unite them in making it harder for the addict to continues his/her bad behavior. The social pressure is great for changing behavior, but sorry that wont work with parents who aren't as noticeable in public about how well their kids are doing in school.

So, what is wrong with putting the same amount of effort in trying to convince parents/caregivers what an important role they play if they want their children to get a good education?

Nothing wrong with a public relations campaign. Just don't expect good results.

It also would help if teachers can fail students early and kick them out of their classes if they are not learning-- instead of tolerating them for the year, or semester. I notice this year they seemed to be doing something like that. After the first couple weeks there was a change on friday last week where all the classes in the whole shcol were redistributed. Teachers were able to send some of their students in their classes to an "overflow" class. I wouldn't want to sub in an overflow class, but then they seem to be taught by some of the most competant staff, and perhaps these classes might be better in a couple months.

Working the wrong end of the problem

But that's mostly the case. What else can the school do?
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