D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown seeks to recruit top teachers to low performing schools by freeing them for two or three years from the district’s oppressive IMPACT evaluation system.

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If Brown’s idea went national, however, think of the incentive it would provide for teachers who want to actually teach (as opposed to just complying with top down micromanagement) to transfer to poor schools in order to do so. Before long, the suburbs would have lost so many teachers that they would be filling their classrooms with 23-year-old wonders trying to prove how hard they can work with no sleep and no peace of mind, while under the thumb of evaluators whose lack of knowledge just makes them more self-righteous.

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Liberating teachers who commit to the toughest schools would be the first step in liberating all teachers and students from excessive test prep, narrowing the curriculum and rote instruction.

But do suburban kids really post better test results than their peers in city schools? Not if they’re from middle- and upper-income families. Scores are virtually the same for those students on statewide reading and math tests, no matter where they live, according to a Pioneer Press analysis.

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The results show what education experts have known for decades: Poverty, and the social factors that often go with it, matters more than where you live.

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The Pioneer Press analysis found that children living in poverty had significantly better scores in the suburbs than in the city. In the outer suburbs, about 64 percent of low-income kids met reading standards this year compared with 43 percent in the core cities.

As Pekel puts it, there’s poor and then there’s really poor. Poor children in the core cities are more likely to not have a stable residence and to bounce from home to home or shelter to shelter. Others don’t receive good medical or dental care, which can leave with untreated problems that grow from minor ailments to those bad enough to keep them at home or distract them from learning.

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That doesn’t mean, however, that people should assume low-income students are destined to fail. As suburban populations change to look more like city schools, districts need to work together to advance their most-disadvantaged students instead of pitting them against each other, education experts say.

I contend that education is instead the “civil rights struggle of our day” because of the massive injustice that lies at its core. Many young people in this country suffer the daily injustices of

• attending schools that teach them how to fail—and teach them they will fail—rather than how to succeed.
• being told that their knowledge, passions, and talents are irrelevant in the face of others’ standards and expectations.
• attending schools that treat them more as inmates than as valued community members and developing learners.
• attending schools with no libraries, no playgrounds, and not even doors on the bathrooms or toilet paper in the stalls.
• risking their lives daily as they walk to and from school, while politicians dismiss school bus service as being too expensive to take to scale.

We should have the confidence to name these injustices, loudly. We should also have the confidence to demand that all Americans share the burden and sacrifices of this fight. Civil rights struggles can’t and shouldn’t be fought solely by educators, or solely in the urban core.

It’s not so much the poverty that people found shocking, but that it was, gasp, reaching into the suburbs! How dare it leave its urban center!

Suburban counties that have relied on growth now face some important dilemmas beyond the short-term demand for social services, Gillaspy said. Are the declines in marriage and childbirth just short-term delays, or long-term changes that will dampen the growth of suburban communities and school enrollments? Is the economy delaying people’s moves to the suburbs, or is the outward growth wave slowing down?

Um… let’s not blame the recession for everything. School enrollment, marriage and childbirth rates… these are trends that were occurring before the recession. People are getting married later, women are waiting to have children, smaller birthrates over the past decade mean smaller school enrollment. What is this “outward growth wave” they’re talking about?

Suburban counties are “moving from a very prosperous kind of attitude to one of very great concern,” Gillaspy said. “If you’re living out there, even if you have a job, you’re going to notice people around you who are losing their jobs or losing their homes.”

Really? Why is this only a concern for suburbanites? Because usually those things happen in the city? Not likely. People in suburbia have lost jobs, had houses foreclosed on, etc for as long as there were suburbs. The difference is that in the suburbs, we don’t talk about it. It’s a secret. Keeping up with the Jones. Statistical data is being reported that highlights it, all of a sudden we’re concerned.

In the big picture, Minnesota remains among the most prosperous and healthy states in the nation, Gillaspy said.

So… quit yer whinin’!

Still, an interesting article highlighting some of the census findings, though probably a little too much interpretation and not enough data, to be considered unbiased. In fact, if you consider this unbiased reporting, you might want to look up the definition of unbiased.

600 youth, 16 beds. Um… yes, I’d say we’re failing our youth. Yes, some of them are runaways, but some are homeless for other reasons. If their parents can’t or won’t take care of them, who will?

teachingliteracy:

“It’s always great to see role models who are identical to one’s self in any environment,” said Kimetta Hairston, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education. “Children need teachers who care about them and who respect their cultural and learning differences.”

A great resource for this topic (research-wise) is CNN’s Black In America series/site.

The telling stat, to me, is that a white felon is more likely to get hired than a black man. This is not the way it should be.