Re: Poverty

[ABurke5054@aol.com]

What a ridiculous exercise in double-talk.  Poor kids need good  schools.  
NCLB says that If there are problems with the schools poor  children attend, 
states should fix them.  Do you really think the NAACP  would be arguing in 
federal court that CT should enforce the letter and spirit  of NCLB, if it thought 
NCLB had "no connection with improving schools?"
 
Art
 
In a message dated 6/24/2006 3:43:27 AM Pacific Standard Time,  
pwmjoy@earthlink.net writes:

Someone on the list stated the following: "No one believes that the  choice 
is either improving schools or  improving children's lives outside  school. Why 
do you continue with this schematized nonsense that no is actually  saying 
and that no one believes?" 
 
This is a convenient either/or reduction of the debate in order to avoid  the 
complexity of the issue. The question is this: is the improvement of  schools 
affected by poverty outside of school. The answer is unequivocally  "yes". 
There are other parallel social phenomena where poverty has a direct  impact on 
a variety of organizations: improving prisons is directly affected  by 
poverty......in fact, schools become more like prisons to the exrtent that  students 
come from poverty and the attendant experiences of violence, crime,  abuse, 
neglect, hunger, illness both physical and mental, and all the negative  isms 
that an unjust form of capitalism structure into society. 
 
To the extent that any vision of school improvement avoids, denies, or  
refuses to address this is the extent to which that school improvement plan  will 
cater to those at the high end of the socio-economic spectrum and leave  behind 
the rest in descending order of their position on this 
ladder of wealth. Those who assert that school achievement exists outside  
the total context of a child/teen's life have very little to say that will  
truly help our schools improve. Yes, there are those who will achieve inspite  of 
poverty just as there are those who will fail inspite of their riches. Yes,  
choice is their's. In the case of students who live in poverty, schools need  
to be reshaped so that the forces of poverty do not continue to make school  
experience meaningless thereby making it more possible that those students  
choose to improve themselves in schools that we have also chosen to  improve. 
 
NCLB, standardized testing, and the rhetoric quoted in the first few  lines 
above have no connection with improving schools.  All the  mumbo-jumbo analysis 
of scores on these tests coupled with the incredible  absence of hands on 
experience in school that such volcanic rhetoric suggests  pales in importance 
before the horror and tragedy of poverty in America and  that, like it or not, 
schools are only as good as those
who take this seriously and try to do something about it.  
 
Peter Majoy