Boys, the new underclass

A very provacative article reinforces some obvious trends that no one wants to talk about. Boys are an at-risk population. We know this has always been true of black boys but today white boys are no better off.

College
Affirmative action for boys?
4/7/2006

There’s an endangered minority on American college campuses, said Kevin Wack in the Portland, Maine, Press Herald. It’s not gays, or blacks, or even conservatives. It’s men. Today in the U.S., “about 57 percent of college students are female,” and they earn about 200,000 more bachelor’s degrees annually than do males. On plenty of campuses, the girl-boy ratio is approaching 60-40; at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, it’s 80-20. To coax more men into applying, institutions of higher learning are getting desperate. At Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., where men made up only 36 percent of the Class of 2004, the administration added more photos of men to its admissions literature. When the Class of 2007 at Husson College in Bangor, Maine, came in at 65 percent women, the school responded by creating a football team. Many administrators are even resorting to lowering admissions standards for boys—in effect, practicing male affirmative action.

Read the rest of the article and weep. Nobody has an iota of sympathy.

The Gap

Connecticut educators have tried everything to disguise, hide from sight, and avoid dealing with the so-called gap in education. That is, the perennial reminder that inner city schools are exercises in futility. There are a myriad of reasons for this and CT isn't the only state dealing with the issue.

Of course, NCLB is the thinly disguised canard intended to hide this disgrace. Don't bother looking behind that wall of deceit, nobody there but an army of propagandists, theocrats, and neo-lunatics running America as though it were an insane asylum to be toyed with.

PBS is running a series within the Newshour program tracking an inner city school "turnaround specialist". Last time I watched, he was having a very bad time of it. Very bad.

I should remind you that in the last presidential vote nowhere was the vote bluer than the urban centers of this country. For most of my life, I've cared deeply about social justice, human rights, and the civil rights movement.

It has not escaped my attention that education has become a blunt instrument of racism against black men in particular. The Gap I mention in the title of this post was brought to my attention of a co-worker. He sent me a link "For your blog". The artcle, Doubts spread about effectiveness of drug-free school zone laws, March 23, 2006, Associated Press, talks about the obvious consequences of drug-free zoning laws that ratcheted up the punishments for drug offenders caught within school radiuses.

At recent meetings, activists with Connecticut's A Better Way Foundation - which supports the bill - have displayed maps of major cities showing huge sections designated as drug-free zones. A map of New Haven indicated that Yale University's golf course was the only large part of the city not encompassed in one of the overlapping zones.

Most states have drug-free-zone laws; they often entail mandatory prison terms that preclude such options as probation or treatment.

Lolita Buckner Inniss, a Cleveland State University law professor, is a vocal critic of the laws. Her research found that drug dealers in inner cities and compact rural towns were disproportionately likely to incur the extra penalties, in contrast to dealers in suburbs where zones covered relatively small portions of the communities. That urban-suburban split has the effect of making minorities more likely to bear the brunt of tougher sentencing rules, she said.

"I've been dissatisfied by how the public mutely accepts these laws," she said.

Though intended to deter drug sales to youths, the laws have been applied mostly to adult-to-adult transactions, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a private research group advocating alternatives to prison.

It cited a study by William Brownsberger, a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general who reviewed 443 drug cases in three cities. He found that 80 percent of the cases occurred in drug-free school zones, but only 1 percent involved sales to minors.

"The laws have an undeniable appeal - nobody wants drugs near schools," Brownsberger said in a telephone interview. "But the evidence suggests they're not effective in moving drug dealing away from schools. If every place is a stay-away zone, no place is a stay-away zone."

The adults in question are almost always black men. Yes, this is unfair and expensive and unworthy of America, yada yada yada...

But there's more to this. Another article, 'Marriage Is for White People' by Joy Jones, Sunday, March 26, 2006; this time from the Washington Post tells us about the new social units called families.

"If Jesus Christ bought me an engagement ring, I wouldn't take it," a separated thirty-something friend told me. "I'd tell Jesus we could date, but we couldn't marry."

And here's the new twist. African American women aren't the only ones deciding that they can make do alone. Often what happens in black America is a sign of what the rest of America can eventually expect. In his 2003 book, "Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men," Andrew Hacker noted that the structure of white families is evolving in the direction of that of black families of the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black families were headed by a husband and wife, compared to 90.9 percent for whites. By 2000, the figure for white families had dropped to 79.8 percent. Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960. So my student who thought marriage is for white people may have to rethink that in the future.

And yet we have educators and politicians who think school accountability can be acheived by administering high-stakes factoid testing to be sure every student is homogenous within a grade level.

The gaps in the administration of justice, an understanding of the social fabric of this country, the disconnect between religious dogma and religious practice, and so on are minor gaps in America.

The biggest gap exists between the ears of our tone-deaf politicians, educators, and citizenry who have forgotten how to think critically, act responsibly, and vote independently. What we are doing to the black men of this country is the most mortal sin in a deep and wide cesspool of recent all-time historical lows.

Oh, I've already been told that this has nothing to do with region 19, it's somebody else's problem.

Legislating Deadly Education

American education is being strangled by bad education law. These laws, often sugar-coated with magnanimous sounding titles, do far more damage to society than anyone can dream.

AREN'T I GOOD? I WILL NOT LEAVE ONE CHILD BEHIND! I MUST BE GOOD.

The most mean-spirited monsters America has ever created hold the levers of power these days. They win elections by convincing their all too eager followers that kids are lazy, distracted, stupid, and unworthy of promotion through the school system. Their sneering animous for teachers, schools, and children rewards them richly with re-election time after time.

You are all supposed to believe that children aren't working hard enough. Oh, and parents are too lazy to control their kids or spend enough time with them or... And kids disrespect authority - they can't read or write or remember everything Conservative Holy Seers like William Bennett DEMAND they know. "Don't know it yet - we have time - we'll repeat it and repeat it and repeat it... YOU MUST KNOW THIS BECAUSE I KNOW THIS"

Oh, yes. These kids need testing till their eyes bleed and their fingers blister. It's all for the good brothers and sisters.

Let's be sure that the CMTs punish all kids not passing and any schools who pass too few. Let's just PUNISH EVERY childhood educational thing we can - it is all corrupt (unlike the Carlyle Group or Halliburton).

Yes, all this testing is for our own good. Where are you if you aren't an absolute clone of the student sitting next to you? We wouldn't want anyone to be different because that would mean SOMEBODY'S exercising illegal individuality!

Forget what you read in the NYTimes. Things like;

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: March 20, 2006

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

The tangle of legislation, the mind-numbing emphasis on high-stakes testing, and the neo-nazi enthusiasm for educational conformity to the Bush oligarchy and Orwellian "accountability" practices is paralyzing schools. We can no longer provide even second-world standards of education to our kids. And curriculums are near impossible to change for the better.

In Ashford, school computers are TEN YEARS OLD. In technological terms, we are three generations of technology removed from yesterday. The school owns one smartboard.

EOSmith, similarly, offers far too many programs that beg and cookie-sale their way through the school year. The school needs a new curriculum, up-to-date technology (smartboards, iPOD server, teacher training, curriculum development finances, freedom from idiot-driven legislation, the right to experiment to improve education for our kids no matter what NCLB says, and so on). We need the ability to develop programs tha that inner city students can plug into. We need regional programs that would currently violate even more idiot laws. We need to free ourselves of Texas education and get back to Yankee ingenuity. We need some Hartford insurance companies to sponsor Chinese teachers with insurance and cost-of-living so that the schools and businesses here can learn together.

Connecticut has some of the very poorest cities in the country and we live in a state hell-bent on not graduating our students, not creating alternative prohgrams, not trusting teachers, not promoting individuality, not thinking independently, not exercising its federal autonomy - in short, kissing Bush's ass rather than treating education as a sacred trust. That has got to change.

We don't need one more day of right-wing propaganda about schools, kids, or teachers. Not one. We need relief from bad law, we need federal funding and state funding and we need a moritorium on media jackasses who freely bash our kids, parents, and schools without a fight.