South rated low on ladder to success

[Moloch]

Babies born in the Deep South, including Georgia, are less likely to be successful in school and in life than those in other states, according to new research.

Georgia ranked 38th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in providing the basics children need to prosper, the report, published Wednesday in Education Week, found.

"These are your kids," said Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Maryland-based Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which conducted the analysis for the weekly newspaper. "It's the school systems' responsibility to educate the students — regardless of what condition they come to school in."

Virginia claimed the top spot, and New Mexico was last, on the study's "Chance for Success" index, which evaluated the role of education in a child's life. By combining 13 social, economic and educational measures, researchers created a picture of "educational trajectories," representing lives that rise or fall depending on where a child is born.

http://www.ajc.com/services/content/metro/stories/2007/01/03/0104metquality.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=13

[nealmhughes]

1. Nothing to say. It is sad but true.

I saw freshman after freshman come into college with a diploma that had the seals of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and yes, Virginia, on them only to have to tell them small things like:

Their is not the same word as there.
One does not normally use an apostrophe to denote the plural, i.e., dogs means more than one dog, and dog's denotes that which belongs to one dog, and dogs' means more than one dog possess something.
Israel is a modern state founded in 1948, not by King David in 900BC, that was the ancient unified Kingdom of Israel and Jerusalem is in Judah, Israel was in the North.
Mexico is connected to the United States and Central America. Canada is not an island, they mostly speak French and English there. There are islands in Canada, though and some Canadians do not speak English or French. The United States did not fight the Russians in the Second World War, not the First, believe it or not, we were allies in both. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, not a Russian revolutionary. His goal was universal brotherhood with no class distinctions, not a military dictatorship.

This was History 101 and 102 at the University of Alabama. Why were they unprepared? I blame themselves as much as their parents and teachers and educational establishment in the South. College seems to be a non-stop football party preparation occasionally interrupted by an odious test and book to read. They will get jobs through their connections, not on their gpas. These are the middle class kids. I found the working class kids to be much more studious than their wealthier cohorts, yet they attended the same schools.

Yes, the South is still burdened by a rigid class structure, and until that changes, and it slowly is, education will continue to take a back seat to sports and pleasure. David Hackett Fisher addresses this in his seminal work Albions Seed where he found that the Tidewater culture was associated with "Passing the time" while other regions were more oriented to "Improving the time" and "Studying the time", i.e., business and religion took more importance than parties and dances and sporting events and fishing and hunting.

That, alas is our legacy, a colonial culture of economic domination by a few and a resigned acceptance that one cannot "improve", only pass the time as pleasurably as possible... I won't even go into our racial heritage here, that is too obvious. But it is part and parcel of the school boards'and state legislatures'history of neglect. Couple that with parents who are complacent, and voila...one has the South.

[Daveparts]

7. Bingo, Class structure

Having moved to Alabama in my second year of high school I felt my academic career had come to and end. I didn't want to read Huckleberry Finn again as a senior. I had read every book on the (proscribed book list) I explained the situation to the teacher and she advised I could read other books with her prior approval. Ok I was a smart ass kid The Communist manifesto and Lenny Bruce's How to talk dirty and influence people were turned down as well as Catcher in the Rye. So I tried a different tact Dialogues of Plato was turned down as well as Meditations of Marcus Aurelius for no other reason than the teacher hadn't read them
I could have done my report on the Dialogues as the true story behind Mickey and Minnie and Meditations might have been about the Beatles trip to India.

It is all about race and class with an anti intellectual bent.The integration battles of the sixties and seventies left a bad taste in their mouths about know it all intellectuals.The millage rate for the public school I attended hadn't gone up in thirty years and when they tried to raise it the opposition claimed people would lose their homes and be out on the street. The property tax for the last home I owned in Alabama was $116.00 annually

[treestar]

9. The one about Israel explains a lot right there

About how persecuted the Christian Church is when it comes to being able to mention the Bible in the classroom. :sarcasm:

[aaronbees]

24. As a former composition teacher, I agree on that frustration

I taught English composition two years at a local, rural community college in an Arkansas town with little industry apart from the local poultry operations. It was too maddening to me to see students come into an entry level composition course who could not write a sentence, much less structure a paragraph, all with spelling that told me they spent little time reading, particularly any challenging texts. Many of my students were eager to learn and could participate in discussions intelligently and show curiosity there, but the gulf in the tools they needed was so vast it really inspired me to leave the profession (well, it was one of several reasons). Now, to be fair, I saw some of that when I taught comp in Washington state, but not to the grand and dispiriting degree I saw down here. At some point, the system had just failed many of my students. What was interesting to me was how older students had a much finer grasp of the basics than their younger counterparts.

I've not been in the South long enough to know why this is the case, but much of what you say on background about this problem makes some intuitive sense to me. Around here (in a metro area of 70,000), there's a strong push by the local business community and workforce boards to push for vocational education; and while there's nothing wrong with industrial vocational education, I can't help but think part of that push means industries and business leaders want to steer people to voc ed at the expense of higher ed.

The South has great people, but by and large they're poorly served by the educational institutions ... at least from what I've experienced.

[onehandle]

2. And these kids are now grown up and voting Republican.

Which is why Ralph Reed and Karl Rove have made Georgia central in sustaining Nixon's Southern Strategy.

I was born here, but did pretty well with a Catholic School education and a Liberal Soul.

[rpannier]

3. The point by Mr. Christopher B. Swanson

"It's the school systems' responsibility to educate the students — regardless of what condition they come to school in."

This is all nice and good in a perfect world. The fact is teachers can only do so much...they are with these children 6 to 7 hours a day five days a week.

If the child and/or family does not value education, no amount of teaching will make things equal.
I have been living in Korea for almost a decade and have four school age daughters. All four do very well in school and always have.

The oldest two girls are from my wife's first marriage. They didn't have a lot of money before their father died and they had less after he died, yet they did well in school.

Money helps, but it's not the end-all. Our daughters spend a lot of time reading and we do lots of things together -- some educational, some just fun things. Lots of our daughters friends who do well come from families that value education.

Attitude on the part of parents, the children and innate ability are far more important IMO.

[treestar]

10. Good point. Americans tend to think it is the school alone

that provides a good education, and many even go so far as to think the school provides morals and values - why else do they expect the school to forward their religion, for example? Or they send their kids to a religious school so they can "learn" what their parents example does not provide.

[JNelson6563]

4. Hard to believe

considering the federal dollars that flow to the south, not to mention, the manufactuaring of munitions.

Julie

[SoCalDem]

5. If you want smart, healthy kids

don't expect them to be raised by poverty-stricken Moms & Dads who are working 6 crappy jobs between them, and farming the kids out to any relative who will watch them for free.

It starts with the parents.
It starts with the family structure.

Desperately poor people have a very hard time raising confident, intellectually curious children.

Poor kids often endure family strife (no money makes for many a fight)
poor kids are often fed substandard food
poor kids often have little or no help with homewoek/school projects
poor kids who see only other poor family members can have a hard time feeling inspired

Making sure a family has a living wage/income/subsidy/whatever would be a great place to start..

but when there's billions being spent on wars, the states get very little help these days

[SemperEadem]

34. I think it also has to do with

how religious the family is and how important being intelligent (or an intellect) is as opposed to how 'religious' they appear to be to their neighbors. In some circles, being intelligent is kin to worshipping Satan.

[kstewart33]

6. I grew up in Alabama.

It's a beautiful state with many fine, good-hearted people. But I would not raise my children there.

[piedmont]

27. So did I...

I very much want to move back and raise a family there-- but depending on the local school situation we would consider home-schooling (though not the crazy christian-based stuff). Of course, bad school systems occur in other parts of the country too.

[The2ndWheel]

8. Isn't some state always going to be last?

Or 38th? Or 24th? How does anyone catch up? If some state moves up, another moves down.

That's the problem with having to be successful in life. Nothing is ever enough.

[LiberalFighter]

11. It matters how much one is at the bottom

If the difference is major.. it matters
If the difference from top to bottom is minimal then it doesn't matter.

[The2ndWheel]

14. Wouldn't that mean that

the best would have to get worse, for the worst to get better?

Unless everyone can have everything.

Also always depends on who's definition of difference, major, and minimal you're using.

Crazy world we live in.

[napi21]

12. Of course some State is always going to be last or any of the other

rankednumbers, but each needs to improve over prior years, and most are not!

I was just talking to my son about the school system yesterday. He has 2 children in grade school here in Ga. His daughter, in 3rd Grade, has a 99.7 GPA. He spends quite a bit of time teaching both his kids things they didn't understand from the classroom. He went to school in Pa. and his opinion of the schools in both SC & GA are very poor. He now blames the teachers, and feels that the ones he's met are lazy. They have studentsexchange test papers and check each others work instead of doing it themselves. He feels giving 3rd & 4th graders 3hours of homework each day is excessive, and has asked what exactly they do during class that would still require that much homework?

The other thing I have seen since we moved to the South is that most parents don't consider education to be important. Many have told me how they can't wait for their kids to get old enough to get out there and start earning some darn money!

[The2ndWheel]

13. To what end?

"but each needs to improve over prior years, and most are not!"

What's the goal of endless improvment? Once you get there, can you then stop improving? What's the perfect state of schools? Is it possible to improve on that perfection once attained?

"studentsexchange"

Watch your language.

Schools are fighting the same fight as everything else. The fight against entropy. The larger the scale, the tougher it is to keep the fight going, because you need more and more energy just to stay at normal.

[napi21]

25. Sorry aboutnot putting the space in the right place in students exchange.

I believe you're really dreaming when you talk about perfection in a school system. None of them have perfection, and most likely never will. There is always going to be a #1 that sets the current goal for the rest, but #1 isn't perfect either. I know in Ga.the biggest problem the school districts face is the extremely high drop out rate. It's higher than thenational average.

More than 2,500 students drop out of HS every day in the US! See link:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2667532&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

I have never been in education, so I have no idea what to do about it, but I sure hope someone does!

[The2ndWheel]

31. Just messing with you

I found student-sex-change funny.

I'm not saying I think there is some perfect school system. The questions I was asking were about where we're going in our endless pursuit of perfection.

[daleo]

15. That is a problem with ranking, as a metric

But ranks are based on some absolute measure, and the range in the absolute measure is what is important. A horse that comes in dead last by 5 lengths is a better horse than one that came in dead last by 50 lengths.

[The2ndWheel]

32. Only in a race

Not sure why we've made life into one. We've got no destination, but we're trying to get there quickly.

[daleo]

33. I agree, ranking and status seeking have become too pervasive

Society has developed an unhealthy obsession with rankings. I suppose it is a reflection of the corporate mindset that has taken over most of society's official channels of discourse (media, government, higher education, etc.).

[RubyDuby in GA]

16. On the whole I agree, but on an individual level - I call bullshit

I was educated in Georgia. Honors programs and graduated with honors from high school and college. I fully believe I can hold my own against anyone in Trivial Pursuit. :)

I am one of those crazy people that believes you can't blame teachers for the failings of a student. You need to place an emphasis on education from the moment a child is born and they must understand that you, as a parent, believe that education is the most important thing.

I have a 7 month old son. I read to him everyday. Right now, his favorite thing to do is chew on a book, but that will eventually lead to him reading the book.

A love of learning isn't something that's picked up later on. It must be developed from a very early age.

No matter where you live.


On edit: with this all being said, I went to what is historically known as a "teacher's college". I will home school my child before I entrust him to some of the idiots being churned out there. Good teachers are being forced out for younger ones who will work for less (amazing as it is - they already don't make what they should) and who know less. People coming out of the colleges today are already structured to teach for a test - not to teach for the pursuit of knowledge itself. I will agree that intellectual curiosity is basically dead in the South, but I don't believe that is limited to just this region. America as a whole lags behind desperately when compared to the rest of the industrialized nations of the world.

[DixieBlue]

17. Amen, Ruby Duby ...

I grew up in Appalachia to dirt poor, working class parents. But, I graduated high school with honors and would've done so in college had I not had one Hunter Thompson-esque quarter. I think there's a lot the system can do to make things better, to even the playing field, but if there's not family involvement somewhere the kid's a goner.

Luckily for me my parents were both very intellectually curious. They passed that onto me and I'm hoping I pass that along to my own child.

[SemperEadem]

36. I agree with you

I read to my daughter, also, from the time she was a baby. She is the more voracious reader I know--reads a lot of history and biographies. When she used to have a blog, she would list the books she had recently read and the people reading her blog (she got about 150 hits/day) would thank her for posting her list and would go get the books to read themselves.

If I wasn't an avid reader, she wouldn't be an avid reader. If education wasn't important to both her father and me, it wouldn't be important to her. Kids follow by example from the time before peers weigh in--and that example is set by the parent. Was I rich? Not hardly. I was a struggling single mom; but there were important things in my life which I made time for: one of those being the education of my daughter. It comes back to the parent, ultimately, and the example they bothered to set for their child. If they couldn't be bothered to care about their child's education, then the child will grow up as a result of that parent's lack of concern on this issue.

[Acadia Blue]

18. No kidding. I am here in the deep pit of the bible belt and its a

corporatists wet dream. Low wages for most, high wages for CEOs and executives and very little opportunity. Not enough community colleges ect

[Mudoria]

19. n/t

[Firespirit]

20. I'm not surprised

I grew up in the Deep South. The school system in my 80% Republican county was so bad that I just quit and went to college without a high school diploma. I'm partway through a Master's degree but I'm officially a "dropout." Go figure.

It's a cultural problem. The majority of public schools there are apparently operated by fundamentalists who do NOT hesitate to shove their agenda down students' throats. The one I went to had an AP Biology class in which the final exam (not the AP exam, which is created by the College Board, but the class exam) allowed students to regurgitate Genesis chapter 1 as a correct answer for why there is such diversity of life. A junior high science teacher outright refused to teach evolution, but because it was state-mandated, he had everyone write an outline on the evolution chapter of the textbook as a homework assignment. History classes are just as bad; I had a U.S. history teacher who told the class in 1999 that he thought Nixon was innocent and the Democratic Party had framed him.

The school was ranked in the top 10 in the state by the NCLB-esque scoring system that was in place at the time. That was what awakened me to the utter uselessness of standardized testing as a means of holding schools accountable.

In a county such as that, if you spoke out publicly against this sort of thing, you might as well hire a bodyguard. I'm not kidding. In addition to the fundy/GOP public school, there is an overtly racist private secular academy. When I was a young child, my mother exposed ties of the private school's administrators to white supremacy groups, and she got death threats in the mail for some time afterward.

I hate it, because it bothers me to see such a complete damned WASTE of perfectly good minds. But that school I went to was approved wholeheartedly by the community. That was what the area wanted. Until the South changes culturally, I don't know what we can do, realistically. You can mandate a non-fundy non-jingoistic curriculum, but unless you actually hold the teachers' feet to the fire, the right-wingers will find ways to skirt the law. They always have; they always will, even in education.

[SemperEadem]

37. exactly. Well said.

[depakid]

21. Low social capital and widespread fundamentalism

Is not a recipe for success.



Those who do make it out are exceptional, IMO. Some of the coolest people that I've met are intelligent and refined Southerners who bucked the trend.

[hedgehog]

29. Can you give a source for that map?

I'd be curious about what factors were selected. I'd also like to see it matched up against tax rates.

[depakid]

38. There's a series of them listed here:

The various social "ills" correlated with the lack of social capital are impressive. There's a LOT more to it than just education and "success."

Original source: Social Capital: Measurement and Consequences, by Robert Putnam.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/25/6/1825848.pdf

(maps in appendices. You may have to do your own cross referencing for tax rates, yet I agree, that would be interesting to look at).

There's also shorter series of comparative maps listed in my post on this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1254895#1255155

[AnneD]

I'll second that observation.

You have to be thick skinned, quick on your feet, a warped sense of humour, a squewed sense of reality, and have a bit of humility about where you fit in the scheme of things.

The South does have it's share of intellectuals-they are classed as eccentric and are therefore tolerated by everyone else (like a good old hound dog that has seen better days).

[AnneD]

35. I'll second that observation.

You have to be thick skinned, quick on your feet, a warped sense of humour, a skewed sense of reality, and have a bit of humility about where you fit in the scheme of things.

The South does have it's share of intellectuals-they are classed as eccentric and are therefore tolerated by everyone else (like a good old hound dog that has seen better days).

[pitohui]

22. upward mobility in the south is about impossible

it existed in my parents' day obviously but not for us :-(

[AlCzervik]

23. Fritz Hollings said it best "Build more schools and you won't need to build so many prisons"

[Zorra]

26. All republican voting red states at the bottom. What a surprise. n/t

[Toots]

28. I would venture a bet that these statistics correlate to the red states map

:shrug: sometimes ignorance is bliss and sometimes it is dangerous.

[RebelOne]

30. My grandson, who is 10 years old, was born here in Georgia.

He attends school in a very redneck area. But that child is constantly winning achievement awards in all areas of study. I don't think it is the schools here, but it's the fault of the parents who are not pushing their kids to be successful in school.

[cap]

39. it is the schools as well as the parents

I went to a very bad high school in the South and then to an elite prep school in Boston. Let me tell you, the curriculum itself was as different as day and night.