Rochester, New York’s city schools have a 5% rate of students graduating from high school prepared to go to college, compared with 80 and 90% rates in the suburbs. Yesterday, some other relevant statistics were released:
Since 2000, the teen birth rate in the city has ranged from a high of 87 per 1,000 to a low of 70 per 1,000. In the suburbs, it has ranged from 14 to 10 per 1,000.
The urban rate last year was 75 per 1,000, and the suburban was 11. You can pour all the money you like into urban schools, but schools alone can’t fix this problem, and neither liberals nor conservatives have a solution for it.
Stefan
5%? How the hell can it be 5%??? What the hell are they doing in those schools?
You know what I blame this on the collapse of? Society.
Zach
It’s not a complete solution, but liberals are generally pretty big on educating women about birth control and providing/subsidizing related medical care regardless of a woman’s age and without spooking her out of it by telling mom and dad. Whereas conservatives are big on infiltrating Planned Parenthood and pretending they exist to promote sex trafficking and vilifying abortionists to the extent that they are subsequently murdered.
cathyx
What you basically have to do is fix the parents. That would be a monumental task.
Josie
This is similar to a point I tried to make on an earlier thread when I expressed myself rather badly. There are problems the school system as currently organized just cannot solve. I remember many years ago at a parent teacher conference a mother tried to shift the burden of corralling a recalcitrant boy by saying that the schools should have dormitories and take the kids on full time. At the time I was horrified, but years later I wonder if she didn’t have the germ of a good idea. People just don’t realize what the kids are dealing with all the time they are not in school.
cathyx
The pregnancy issue would correct itself when the graduation rate improves.
Phoebe
What cathyx said. Which is not to say it’s not a good idea to do what you can where you can, kidwise. They’ll be parents one day, most likely.
BruceFromOhio
Its a combined effort to effect, much less try to resolve. Community has to be willing to pony up for good teachers, good teachers need good administration to do the blocking and tackling, good administrators need the backing of the community through school boards and funding from the community, and parents have to be involved at each level to set the expectations for the kids.
Any one piece falls short, the whole thing falls short. Cleveland city schools are in the same funk as Rochester’s, different stats but same challenges. There is no magic bullet or solution – fixing something this far gone takes years and years of consistent, persistent work and funding.
@cathyx: This.
Phoebe
I read somewhere that the only direct correlation of anything with teen pregnancy that anyone’s found is feeding kids breakfast and lunch at school [which reduces the t.p.]. Maybe I’d better go look that up before I go blabbing it.
Cermet (Live to learn or die stupid)
As the saying goes – Stupid is, well, is just being stupid. Saying that adding increased funding to a school system (please, unlimited? What an insane statement that is) would not correct such a problem (far higher teen pregnancy) strikes me as true but still, you have given zero data to prove the statement (that is, the statement you should have said, not the insane one in the article.)Which just shows that you are stupid (ignorance is true of us all, but we avoid making statements like yours unless we have a fig leaf to cover our naked ignorance – learn from your mistakes and maybe you too can go from being stupid to just ignorant … .
Davis X. Machina
Talk to those kids, they’ll ask you — in other words, but it works out the same — ‘Defer what? To when? Why?’
What’s our answer?
nitpicker
Chastity belts. Done.
Nick
New York suburbs keep rejecting school budgets because they don’t want their already sky high property taxes to be raised…that leads the state legislature, the Senate now and before 2009, controlled by suburban Republicans, to make up the difference with state aid, pulling funds from urban schools. New York City has enough clout that its able to somewhat temper its cuts, but places like Rochester, which is represented by two Republicans in the Senate, get bupkis.
WyldPirate
@cathyx:
The parents? They’re not around at, least not most of them. Too many broken homes, too many single-parent families, too many absent (or unknown) fathers, from too many generations of teenage pregnancies and too little opportunity.
Look at the demographics of the Rochester public schools. The answer to which demographic is suffering is—no pun intended–black and white.
Xboxershorts
Good Lord those are horrible statistics. It paints a picture of an horrific divide between the haves and the have nots.
I went to an urban school in Rochester and graduated in ’77. We had a teen pregnancy rate of 0%. Of course, Aquinas was all male at the time…..haves and have nots. Yup.
brantl
Liberals don’t have one solution to this problem, they have several, all of which solve some of the problem. Conservatives have two sides to one answer, slashing social spending of all kinds and jailing any behavior they don’t like, which solves none of the problems and makes bigger jails, which we also can’t afford.
This is another knee-jerk attempt to fasten on one thing as the source of the problem when it clearly isn’t the sole source, as it doesn’t pass the smell test, does it?
And the percentage of teen birth rates is 8.7% at its highest, which doesn’t explain the other 86.3 in any way, now does it? You’re dwelling on what is the insignificant minority, in order to explain the majority. That kind of argument belongs on Reason, doesn’t it?
Seriously, what bullshit is this? Do you think that less than 10% of the kids somehow infected the rest with something, something that ruined their ability to absorb an education?
SiubhanDuinne
This is a very interesting discussion, and I wish I had something to offer the thread apart from a string of “THIS”es.
But as long as I’m here, I need to go O/T for a minute to see if anyone can explain what just happened, well, not “just” but maybe 10-15 minutes ago. I opened Balloon Juice and the first thread title was something like “Please please please let this happen” and it was by Tom Levenson. I clicked on it to access the post and when I did, everything went nuts! Different BJ posts started flashing around on the screen for a few seconds and then it went back to the main browser page on the BlackBerry. Weird, never happened before. So I re-entered BJ and there was (and still is) NO SIGN of a post by that title, and Tom Levenson is nowhere to be found!! Anyone have a clue as to what’s going on?
WyldPirate
@Xboxershorts:
Was Aquinas a parochial school?
Joey Maloney
Would it be laughable to suggest that if there were some fucking jobs that paid a living wage so that parents had time and energy to devote to something beyond bare survival, that might be a good start?
RossInDetroit
The high school I’ve been working in PLACED 81% of its seniors in 4 year schools and 9% in 2 year schools in 2009.
The gulf between that and only 5% being considered college-ready in Rochester is enormous.
scav
@SiubhanDuinne: Time Travel and clearly the votex has broken. I’ve seen disappearing posts before but not the manic behavior.
debit
@Joey Maloney: This. Look at statistics for the last ten years and every one shows productivity going up, but wages either staying stagnant or going down. I work longer hours and for less money today than I did ten years ago. Thank FSM my kids are no longer in school. I’m out the door at 9:00AM, back at 7:00PM most days, no lunch break to speak of, and when I get home I want nothing more than to eat something and go to bed. Who could raise a kid with hours like that?
WyldPirate
@brantl:
The been “infected” with the attitude that drug dealers and the gangsta lifestyle is something to emulate. They have been infected with the attitude that they can “make it big” by being a “gangsta”, rapper or a pro athlete instead of learning a trade or gaining an education. They’ve been infected with the fact that they treat teachers and the concept of education in general with disdain. The young men have had it pounded in their head from birth that they should go out and fuck as many “bitches and ho’s” as possible.
Their ability to learn is intact–it’s what examples they are learning from that is the problem along with the inequality.
aimai
@brantl:
Exactly right. “You can throw all the money you want at the problem?” That’s never actually been tried. You could correct the problem if you, indeed, had all the money we need.
1) Hot breakfast and Lunch for all the kids at school.
2) Safe, clean, friendly, afterschool classes in dance/art/music plus afterschool homework clubs.
3) full health care provided at the schools including dental and sex ed, free contraception.
4) summer work/study programs that include travel and education incentives. That’s what upper class kids get. People don’t get pregnant because that would interfere with the fun they are going to have in their regularly scheduled lives.
5) jobs after graduation.
If you had all that the graduation and college attendance rates would soar. There would still be intractable families and dysfunctional lost kids but the majority of kids would do great. And their families would too.
aimai
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: When Tom posted, it pulled up Glenn Beck and goldline ads. My theory is that Tom was eaten up and devoured by Beck. Everyone ignored Beck’s tendencies towards violence.
The statistics for Rochester are heartbreaking. It’s going to take time to dig themselves out of the ditch because it needs to start in elementary school.
Josie
@RossInDetroit: There may be a difference in students who are placed in 4 year schools and students who are considered college ready. The 4 year school in which I taught a few years ago had an open admissions policy, so that some students were not actually college ready when they entered. Some caught up and some did not.
gnomedad
The Right believes in free will. Suburban kids freely choose to go to college and inner city kids choose to be black and hispanic, get pregnant, join gangs, etc.
Linda Featheringill
@brantl:
You may have a point.
I think that pregnancy and overall failure to go on to college might be two different problems and might be amenable to different corrective efforts.
Michael
It might help if the kids could see an actual benefit from playing by the rules and working hard.
They’re not seeing any reason to try.
RossInDetroit
Birth rates and low college preparedness correlate but that’s not causation. Possible related causes but not provable by far from the information presented.
Don K
This is why I despair about fixing the problems of urban schools. Since Michigan went to a statewide property tax and a dedicated portion of sales tax revenue as the primary funding mechanism for public schools in 1994, a lot of money has been sent to the Detroit Public Schools with damned little to show for it (DPS spends way more than the statewide average per pupil on instruction and support services, and is near the top of the charts in the metropolitan area — statistics available on request).
Clearly the schools are failing these kids and their parents are failing them, and as you say, nobody seems to have a solution.
burnspbesq
@Joey Maloney:
There was a time when Rochester had a huge number of well-paid skilled manufacturing jobs, at Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb and their respective suppliers. Those jobs are gone, and they’re not coming back. I would guess that the University of Rochester is the biggest private employer in the city these days.
WyldPirate
@aimai:
I don’t think so. The problem has its root at home, specifically with intact, functioning families. Even then it is tough.
Until you fix the problem of absent fathers, “baby-mamas’ and grandmothers (if the kids are lucky) being the primary care-givers; the deck is really stacked against these kids. Pouring money into addressing the problems you mention will help, but it isn’t the panacea some think.
gypsy howell
@aimai:
Thank you for saying that. “Throwing money at the schools isn’t the answer”? We’ve never even tried to throw money at the problem. Oh wait– we have. We “throw” money at suburban schools by way of the property taxes levied on the richer homeowners in the suburbs. Funy how those schools seem to do much better. If anything, we should throw much more money per student at the inner city and rural poverty schools, to help them overcome the other obstacles they face.
But no, we’ll never try that. We already “know” that it won’t work.
phx
@Zach: I don’t disagree with this, but I’m telling (and you already know) many young unmarried women/girls WANT to get pregnant.
gnomedad
@Michael:
This. That’s the whole game. And most of the paths from here to there will be derided by the Right as “social engineering”.
Edit: what’s the trick for preserving blockquote paragraphs again? I always forget when I need it. Editing FAQ page, please.
PeakVT
The median income for a city household was $27,123, and the median family income was $31,257. Males had a median income of $30,521, versus $25,139 for females. The per capita income for the city was $15,588. About 23.4% of families and 25.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 37.5% of those under age 18 and 15.4% of those age 65 or over.
In 2000, the per capita GDP for New York was $23,389, and for lowest state (guess which one) it was $15,853.
Citizen_X
@brantl:
Where do you get that out off the post? I read it as two examples of urban dysfunctionality. A correlation, you know. Not a causal link.
Pat
How about easy access to birth control? I’m talking about as soon as that girl/woman can reproduce!!!! Until everyone faces the fact that humans are horny and inquisitive SOB’s nothing will change, especially in the under-served communities.
Michael
@WyldPirate:
It ain’t like our fine white society has eagerly renumerated those who went out and got educated or learned trades, so why should they bother, just to work at a level below their skill set while being treated condescendingly?
Frankly, those who have the sort of entrepeneurial skills necessary to running an illegal enterprise are engaged in about the only occupation which will allow them any sort of upward mobility.
Athenae
Well, I would say first we TRY pouring all the money we like into urban schools, and then decide if it works or not. We have this idea that we’ve somehow done that, which is demonstrably not the case.
A.
dan
What does being college ready mean? are they not ready for Junior college? In today’s school systems, parents pull out their kids from any school they view as failing if they have the means to do it. Regardless whether it is or not. Besides, nationwide only 25% or so of people over the age of 25 have a college education. Why can’t we put in programs at those schools to help train them for other jobs? Medical jobs, construction jobs, etc.
WyldPirate
@Michael:
This is precisely right and I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise. I was simply describing the precursor to the situation.
ETA: Edited to fix blockquote formatting.
Cydney
People want to complain about bad teachers and teachers unions. Yes, there may need to be administrative changes, but the major problem is poverty and the way schools are funded by property taxes. New Trier, a public high school in Chicago, has a 90-something percent college acceptance rate because that school is in a wealthy, stable community. It is obvious that these policies are racist and meant to keep the poorest people, usually black and Hispanic, in their place. Those lazy Negroes shouldn’t benefit from the labor of hard-working whites, amirite?
And poor, minority communities have other problems, like untreated drug addiction, kids being raised in group homes, a lack of education among guardians, and a high rate of incarcerated people, and too many single-parent families. So, you have a kid living in chaos, living in a state of constant insecurity, with few opportunities for educated guidance and then coming to a school that has the worst infrastructure, the worst materials, and probably, an unusually high concentration of bad teachers. This is a recipe for making a kid feel dispirited and degraded.
Now, a kid can survive a bad school OR even a bad family/community situation, but he or she cannot thrive if both situations are bad.
Basically, if politicians aren’t talking about the effect of poverty and race on education, then they aren’t being serious about the problem. The other major issue is race. This is perceived as a black/Hispanic problem. If this were seen as a white problem, Congress would have been on top of that shit.
Race is the reason why Lyndon B. Johnson was able to pass his anti-poverty policies—because back then poverty had a rural white face. Once poverty took on a black/Hispanic face, Republicans were bleating about Cadillac driving welfare queens and Democrats were all about welfare reform.
The solution? Make the face of education and poverty reform white again. No, seriously. We need a campaign that focuses on white poverty and if you can convince the 65% white majority in this country that they have a problem, then they might care. You white folks write a letter, and you can get that shit done. ‘Cause they don’t open our mail.
Sizequeen
People want to complain about bad teachers and teachers unions. Yes, there may need to be administrative changes, but the major problem is poverty and the way schools are funded by property taxes. New Trier, a public high school in Chicago, has a 90-something percent college acceptance rate because that school is in a wealthy, stable community. It is obvious that these policies are racist and meant to keep the poorest people, usually black and Hispanic, in their place. Those lazy Negroes shouldn’t benefit from the labor of hard-working whites, amirite?
And poor, minority communities have other problems, like untreated drug addiction, kids being raised in group homes, a lack of education among guardians, and a high rate of incarcerated people, and too many single-parent families. So, you have a kid living in chaos, living in a state of constant insecurity, with few opportunities for educated guidance and then coming to a school that has the worst infrastructure, the worst materials, and probably, an unusually high concentration of bad teachers. This is a recipe for making a kid feel dispirited and degraded.
Now, a kid can survive a bad school OR even a bad family/community situation, but he cannot thrive if both situations are bad. I went to poor schools until college, but I had one parent who I saw reading books and newspapers. I had one parent (not a guardian or a grandmother) who worked and kept the lights and heat on and made sure I ate three times a day. I had one parent who never did drugs, didn’t party who I could depend on. This was enough to get me through the bad teachers I had (from k-12 at least 60% were indifferent or ineffective, and two were abusive; I had some good teachers who cared and who inspired me, too).
Basically, if politicians aren’t talking about the effect of poverty and racism on education, then they aren’t being serious about the problem. This is perceived as a black/Hispanic problem. If this were seen as a white problem, Congress would have been on top of that shit.
Race is the reason why Lyndon B. Johnson was able to pass his anti-poverty policies—because back then poverty had a rural white face. Once poverty took on a black/Hispanic face, Republicans were bleating about Cadillac driving welfare queens and Democrats were all about welfare reform.
The solution? Make the face of education and poverty reform white again. No, seriously. We need a campaign that focuses on white poverty and if you can convince the 65% white majority in this country that they have a problem, then they might care. You white folks write a letter, and you can get that shit done ’cause they don’t open our mail.
Davis X. Machina
@dan: In NY State it’s a term of art, referring to specific scores on certain of the state Regents’ tests.
HRA
Absent fathers? Sure, also absent mothers and absent fathers plus mothers. Inspiration is one necessary factor. Though you can’t do it by not being there for your children and/or not having the need to inspire them.
Two of my close relatives do belong in the 5%. One is in her last year at Brockport. The other one will graduate from H.S this year with very serious plans to go into neo-natal nursing. I am very proud of them.
NobodySpecial
@WyldPirate: Oh, such bullshit.
What fucking movie did you get that from? Shaft? 8 Mile? Inquiring minds want to know.
You want to know the REAL reason they don’t bother with an education? Go ask them one question. “When’s the last time you ever saw someone get up out of here?”
Chances are, half will mention one person or two. Half won’t mention any. If you ask them about how THEY’RE gonna get out, most of them will answer that they won’t. Not that they’ll be rappers or the head of the local gang. They expect to live and die in squalor and poverty, and the broken schools they’re given grudgingly by rich asswipes who ran out of town at the first mention of a non-white person are recognized for being a waste of time for the success rate you see.
THAT’S what you have to fix. Schools have to become the new churches…the place you WANT to go and the place you WANT to do well in. And it will not be done as long as school boards and taxing bodies are controlled by whites who love their pocketbooks more than their fellow man.
Nick
@WyldPirate:
This is true in the suburbs too. I went to one of the most prestigious high schools in North Jersey and kids had the same attitude.
Bob In Pacifica
How about jobs? When there were factories and a big shipping industry in Oakland CA there was a large healthy middle class. Not so much now.
Nellcote
Wealthy parents send their kids to private schools. This is “throwing money at the problem” on a personal level. It seems to work for them. Why wouldn’t it work on a larger scale?
RobNYNY1957
When I was in high school in the 1970’s in small-town Wisconsin, 22 of the 98 girls in my high school class had babies or were pregnant at the time of graduation. Getting the teen pregnancy rate under 1% (assuming the 1000 refers to girls, not to boys and girls) seems like quite an improvement over that.
WyldPirate
@NobodySpecial:
Churches aren’t exactly doing a land-office business in the inner cities and the message of religion surely isn’t sinking in with this inner-city youth, so talk about some bullshit….
Oftentimes, the only people the see in their neighborhoods that are prospering are the drug dealers. the only role models that they see oftentimes from their own race that have done well are the rappers, the drug dealers and the pro athletes
So what are their alternatives if they don’t finish school and ridicule the kids that do well in school as “trying to act white” (yeah, it happens). what are their alternatives if they can’t even finish school or see no alternatives? I’ll tell youu–either crime or getting on the dole.
I used the term infected because those “professions” I listed have become the only viable alternatives in our society.
WyldPirate
@Nick:
This is called teenage rebellion, not desperation.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
I don’t see it as a racial construct. When the suburbs flourished up here, pretty much everyone above the poverty line – blacks included – fled Cleveland for a ‘country’ home at the first chance they could get. When your funding is based off of property taxes and property values are dropping, at least those that haven’t been tax abated by business desperate civic leaders, you get a failing school ystem.
Once upon a time, maybe, we were better at figuring out how to make this work since we were all in this together. Not as much in our current superpower days, I’m afraid.
burnspbesq
@gypsy howell:
I’m not sure what your beef is here. When I was growing up in one of those towns in northern New Jersey, the school budget and the property tax rate were the subject of a referendum every year. My parents and folks like them volunteered for high property taxes, because they understood the value of education (and, to be fair, because they understood the correlation between the quality of the public schools and the market value of their homes). Isn’t that how democratic government is supposed to work?
Mnemosyne
@WyldPirate:
Yes, in a country where a white ex-con is more likely to get hired for a job than a black man with no criminal record, clearly the problem is that black kids listen to gangsta rap. If we could just get them to listen to Lawrence Welk like kids did in your day, the whole problem would be solved.
Steve
I know plenty of middle and upper class suburban white kids who fit this description. They could recite whole albums of gangster rap lyrics at the drop of a hat. They idolized sports stars and celebrities. They cared far more about music, video games, movies, goofing off and hooking up then anything related to education.
And yet they all went to college. Why? Because that’s what was expected of them. It was never a matter of choice, it was a given, just something you did. This is about cultural norms and pressures. When the only choices presented to you are menial jobs or dealing drugs, it shouldn’t surprise you that people tend to pick one of those options.
Steaming Pile
@Stefan: How can this happen? Easy. Local control of schools. There are dozens of school districts in every New York county. Some of them graduate as few as 30 seniors a year. It’s a big reason – lack of economies of scale – that property taxes are so high. Yet talk to anyone about consolidating school districts, and most will look at you as if you were some kind of Communist or something.
So you have city school districts with all these problems, which persist no matter how much money you throw at them, and the patchwork quilt of suburban districts that surround them, many of which cross town and village lines. Everybody with the means to do so – mainly white, non-Italian, non-Eastern European people – has already moved out of the cities Upstate where their kids don’t have to deal with their counterparts in the cities.
We have more really good Italian, Bosnian (go figure), Lebanese, Polish, and other ethnic restaurants than you can possibly eat in, yet places like Clinton and New Hartford (both near Utica) are mainly populated by WASPs.
It’s been a pipe dream of mine to win the Lotto, throw a couple hundred grand into enough stealth school board races to literally buy them, then do what I would call a drive-by consolidation. One term, make a big difference, then walk out.
Suffern ACE
@Xboxershorts:
Oh, I’m sure some of the students were contributing factors to problems that arose elsewhere.
Jennifer
@RobNYNY1957: Whoa. I was just about to post that in my small-town high school in Arkansas in the late 70s-early 80s, the only girls who showed up to school pregnant were the black girls; the white girls who got pregnant left school (and town) until they were no longer pregnant. Not so these days – there are plenty of pregnant teens of all races roaming the halls. I think we had a total of under 5 teen pregnancies in my 3 years of high school (pregnancies that were known, anyway) out of a population of about 1,000 kids, or some 1,600 if you count the ones that entered high school after me as well. My niece said there were at least 10 times that many while she was in school (she graduated from the same HS last year). I think there are a couple of things at work here: first, I finished high school at the end of an era where it was considered that you had brought shame on your parents and family if you got pregnant before marriage. Maybe that’s a horribly uncompassionate view, but it seemed to be effective. The second I can’t prove but it’s my hunch: fewer of the girls who get pregnant in high school now get abortions, thanks to the increasing hyper-religiousity of the intervening 30 years, and probably also due to the fact that the shame thing is no longer a factor.
But also – high school kids these days are the children of people who have been working to try to keep afloat
get aheadin this country ever since we decided that the people who already have all the money are the ones who should most benefit from the productivity of everyone. Staying in school really paved the way to the good life for mom & dad, eh?Nellcote
I’d like to see as many commercials for condoms as I see for boner pills on the teevee.
Ron
I have an advisee that spent one of her what we call “field periods” which essentially are internships at a Rochester city school. Talking to her about her experience was quite eye-opening. It seemed like a combination of problems with the schools themselves and the students. Of course this is all anecdotal evidence, but she saw one teacher that made no attempt at all to enforce any discipline in her classroom. She also talked to a student that was contemplating following in the footsteps of their father and becoming a drug dealer. There are so many different issues that about the only thing I’m sure of is that no single thing will fix it. I don’t think the teacher there didn’t care about her students, but probably was not really prepared to take control of a classroom like that one. I think that the biggest problem is breaking the cycle of poverty, violence and drugs in the homes there. It is not a simple problem and I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think purely throwing money is enough, but I don’t think it will be done without money either.
daveNYC
I went to school at Rochester back in the early 90s, back when there was still some life at Xerox, Kodak and all the rest, I remember it as an insanely depressed town. I can’t even imagine what it must be like now.
I have two friends who work up there, I have no idea where the business comes from.
Geeno
A large part of the problem in Rochester is the constitutional limit on property taxes of 2%. All of the other cities affected by that clause of the constitution (Buffalo, NYC, Syracuse and Albany – I believe) got exempted back in the 70’s, but Rochester never did. Then the 80’s “tax revolts” came, and it’s now impossible to the limit waived.
Rochester CAN’T throw money at the problem even if it wants to. The city is forbidden from raising taxes, and its Republican reps in the Senate keep volunteering its share of State school aid to help with the budget deficit. The state doesn’t usually take them up on it, but the share never gets increased, obviously.
The Rochester City School District is being starved to death.
Svensker
What aimai said, starting with jobs. In some inner cities — I’m thinking of NJ, of which I know a bit — the school budgets are high compared to other schools, but there is so much corruption that much of the money gets sucked up before it hits the school. Then the kids are essentially parentless with no role models. One friend was a teacher in Paterson (one of those places with 5% graduation rate and 90% pregnancy rate) and when she would have parent/teacher conferences, no parents would show up at all. None. And the kids had learned that the way to derail any disciplinary action was to claim racism on the part of teachers — any claim would go right to an administrative hearing and the teachers were terrified to do or say anything as a result. The problems are just huge, but I do think jobs are the most fundamental thing that can be done.
But, ya know, we need to bomb Middle Eastern countries, so we don’t have the money to even try to do something at home. Oh well.
Nick
@Svensker:
Two of my friends who are teachers, one in Brooklyn, the other on Long Island, had a conversation about this recently. The one in Brooklyn has parent-teacher conferences, no one shows up. When they’re mandated, an uncle or grandparent shows up and sometimes doesn’t even know the kids name or speaks English…usually because the parent(s) is/are working their second or third job.
On Long Island, the parents show up, only to threaten the teacher because their child got detention for punching a kid or got a B instead of an A.
Church Lady
@WyldPirate: You just hit the nail on the head.
Ruckus
@Joey Maloney: @Michael:
These two comments sum up the situation not only in Rochester but all over this country. We have been losing jobs and therefore a future for a good portion of the population for decades. We have been building an economy based on moving money instead of producing and it doesn’t take nearly as many people to move money as it does to produce stuff. Rochester is a prime example as burnsy has pointed out. Some of this is commercial evolution (companies and products become outdated due to innovation) but a lot is the utter failure of the business culture in this country. Cutting costs/jobs is not the only way to make money but it works short term at the expense of long term prosperity. We are now seeing the results.
Gustopher
Rochester has really been Buffaloed, hasn’t it? The jobs leave, and then the center collapses. The rot will affect the suburbs soon enough.
I think a lot of the problem is that we treat this as a local problem, when we are seeing the same thing across the state, the region and the country. With a collapsing tax base, the local governments don’t have the resources to attempt to fix anything substantial, and the collapse spreads outward.
I’d want jobs programs focused on the cities. Government jobs if need be, private jobs if we can attract them. Jobs where the urban poor can get to them.
Buy up office space and factory space on bus lines, and rent it out at below market rates. Get small business loans into the area. Focus on growing small business for a change, rather than chasing after the big companies.
And then part of me thinks that this will take 20-30 years to turn around, and that’s an entire lost generation. Perhaps we would be better off shutting Rochester down, and relocating the refugees in more prospering communities.
Church Lady
This was a big news story here recently, and shows some of the problems facing urban schools and, hopefully, some solutions to those ills:
http://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13824956
Sadly, this problem at this one particular school isn’t that much worse than the what is happening at the rest of them in our city school system.
Tom M
When the state publishes bullshit statistics (really? college ready? srsly?) like these, it’s meant to to throw off the scent. This is the state which touted its improvement in scores (see Bloomberg and Klein et al 2005-2009) until the reveal: the tests got easier.
Until and unless we come to grips with what these statistics tell us, we get the wild fear factor that OMG the US does poorly on international tests. Which also isn’t true. Look at the PISA scores with white only, asian only and black only.
The statistics are bad because this country spent centuries actively preventing a portion of the population from learning. Anything. Is it really a surprise these statistics are like this? Do we think the last 50 years during which liberals have had no solutions (at least one could argue they tried, conservatives just played off the fear) would make a change?
No, now we get Teach for America and charter schools and the cry for vouchers. As others have noted, it’s the poverty and we don’t have anything around designed to help alter that.
MLK: national income. Then we can start with programs to fix the learning.
morzer
@Tom M:
It’s more than poverty. It’s the active scorn for learning, expertise and intelligence that pervades American society. It’s the absence of books in the home (and America has truly alarming statistics for books read per person per year). It’s the lack of stable relationships around a lot of kids. It’s the way Americans persist in trying to “think locally” about problems – i.e. dump them into “other” districts/towns/states and forget about them. Basically, these are the tendencies and the results of a society geared to two considerations: relentless short-term thinking at every level and relentless admiration of money-grubbing and subsequent self-gratification by every means, fraudulent or otherwise.
brantl
Thanks, Aimai.
Steve J.
I lived in Rochester from 1986-99 and the racial antagonism in the city is pretty strong. As I recall, white flight began in earnest the early 60s, declined for several years, then picked up in the early 70s. As a result, there isn’t much of a middle class left in the city limits.
Most of the blacks live in the city and their main neighborhood is close to what I would call a ghetto that was unfortunately self-replicating.
JR
Maryland has the best public schools in the country. Virginia is 4th best. DC, which sits squarely between the best districts in both states, ranks 50th. Figure that one out.
Ruckus
@morzer:
Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?
Beverley
Since boys don’t get get pregnant. I guess this 87 or 70 out of 1000 only pertains to girls. Which means you have 973 girls out of 1000 that get ignored or wind up being in the 5% that go to college only to have to take remedial classes because their high school didn’t properly prepare them for college.
“Inner City” Boys of course, have lower high school graduation rates, lower college admissions, higher incarceration rates but if we can just shame those girls for getting knocked up, the rest won’t get pregnant and then everything will turn around!
Poor people generally have children, their kids generally have poorer outcomes. I don’t have answer but I know this did not help.
Dollared
@burnspbesq: Burns, please read comment 64 and explain to me how that is how democracy is supposed to work.
Aren’t you a lawyer? Read McCleary v. State (of Washington), declaring that eduation is a state responsibility, and that overfunding rich suburban schools and underfunding urban schools is in fact a violation of that responsibility.
Now – how is it again that your rich suburb’s sweet situation is how a democracy is supposed to work?
Bill Cole
I think that’s wrong.
Require and fully fund comprehensive sex ed, repeal the Hyde Amendment, and establish a single-payer health care system that includes comprehensive contraception and abortion coverage.
Handy side-benefit: wingnut heads exploding