6.5% of Chicago Public School freshmen graduate from college

[AngryAmish]

"For black and Latino male ninth-graders, the numbers are even more alarming. Only about 3 percent wind up graduating from four-year colleges within six years."

This is a crime. Nobody cares about these children. This is especially true of the folks running the schools.

I have no idea what can be done. Do you?

[LeftHander]

1. don't need no college edumacation to werk at WalMert...nt

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. We left 93.5% behind?

[Zynx]

3. Republicans have destroyed public education.

It has been a mission of theirs to turn education private. It makes me sick.

[marmar]

4. Absolutely. They hate public schools....

Just like they hate most public institutions. These are sick, evil, twisted bastards.

[AngryAmish]

5. in Chicago?

This is not about party affiliation. This is about public officials who -judging solely by results- either do not care, want minority children to fail or are utterly incompetent.

[Zynx]

6. That's true, but I am speaking on a general basis.

In Wisconsin, the state Republican Party has made total war on our public education system and it has hurt all, not just minority students. They want public schools to be awful so that they can pitch private schools.

[AngryAmish]

7. Hardly any white parents send their kids to public school in Chicago

And the white kids tend to be children of recent immigrants. The Catholic schools in Chicago do very well because anyone who can afford it sends their kids to private schools.

There are a few "magnet" schools that give a good education but getting into there is really hard.

We, the white people of Chicago, are guilty of base racism in not caring about minority children. There is no other explanation.

Plus so many of the teachers and administraters do not care or are imcompetant. They also are guilty.

[Zynx]

9. Indeed. Racism is alive and well in the North.

Milwaukee just proved that recently.

[Yupster]

21. This is an anecdote, so take

it for what it's worth.

A person I grew up with was always a very poor student throughout her life. She had little use or interest in education. She went to college for a short time and dropped out.

To her credit over very many years she got a degree as a Special Ed teacher. I thought this was great because she is a caring person and I thought she could do some good.

I saw her a few years ago and she told me she was now a classroom teacher teaching high school science. "Science" I asked, "How can you teach science, you don't know any science." I know I was wrong and hurt her feelings but I was just shocked when she said it because this is a person with as close to zero academic knowledge as a person could have. Her answer was with a hurt look on her face. She said "I'm learning."

I also know of a college where there were music teachers with close to no knowledge of history teaching college history because their music sections didn't fill.

It's all pretty shocking to me, though I am a former teacher myself and saw some pretty incompetent teachers myself. Of course there were very many wonderful ones too.

I do think if you send your kid to college and pay for his history class, there should be some expectation that the teacher is qualified in the subject and is not a piano teacher who didn't fill her piano class.

When I taught we had a woman in our department who was a math teacher but she was not a good teacher, though she was a nice person. Her kids did poorly on the standardized tests. The school's solution was to move her to the science department where there was no standardized test. Of course this compounded the problem because now she was a not-very good teacher who also didn't know her material.

edited to remove a few details just in case. I sure don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, especially nice people that I like.

[Southsideirish]

8. The foreign kids at my public jr. college are so much more mature

and motivated. They can do triple rings around our own American kids and leave them spinning in the wind.

[madrchsod]

10. the problems in the chicago school system

are so deep there isn`t any way to fix them unless one starts to fix the root cause -no jobs in the neighborhoods and the gangs. the jobs are gone to mexico,china,and third world countries. when dave and barry`s sell jeans sown in ghana for seven dollars and people can sell drugs for a couple hundred dollars a day something is really fucked up.
when children can`t play with out fear of death.when they can be in their homes without fear of being killed by a stray bullet,when you men can walk without fear of gang harassment,when the children can have pride in themselves and can see a future beyond their corner then just maybe they can succeed.

[DaveJ]

12. I've lived in the city for a couple years and no gang problems here

There are gangs but they don't really do much. I walk to and from the train station every day for work, never been harrassed by anyone. We don't have bars on any windows. Irving Park and Pulaski, not a fancy neighborhood or anything.

[AngryAmish]

13. White folks don't see the gang problem

The large majority of murder victims and murderers are black and latino. If a victim is not white the press don't care.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. This is both good and bad. It allows white folks to pretend there is not a problem. As stated above, white folks don't send their kids to public schools so nothing is done about that problem.,

Go to the west side around Cicero and Chicago. Or go to Englewood and then tell me that the gangs don't do much.

I love my city. But if I get married and have kids I'm moving because the schools are so awful.

[DaveJ]

15. Do your teachers know who are in the gangs?

Teachers are our HS will ask students if they belong to gangs. As long as the teachers say nothing and move on the kids are more likely to be honest and tell them the truth. Then if something does happen they are more likely to know who is involved. Just wondering if they use the same technique elewhere. Like I said it's peaceful around here and it's mostly Latino. As long as the gangs are peaceful they don't bother me, it's the crimes they commit that matter.

[redwitch]

11. That's horrible!

Smaller schools, smaller classes, take them out of drug and crime infested areas, get their parents decent jobs and better education which they will value and pass down. Give them hope, mostly. Make gang culture uncool, keep their families whole and supportive. There is no one fix to such deep problems, so many things need to be addressed simultaneously. America is really sliding into the abyss on so many levels it is sickening.

[DaveJ]

14. I think I know a solution...

My stepdaughters are in public schools here and I think the problem is that the administrators are too career focused and not academically inclined enough. For instance my stepdaughter was expected to take an auto class for three years. She wanted to switch to another program called academy of finance, take high level biology and physics, and they would not let her. They expect that poorer kids will not go to college and therefore train them with non college oriented material. They assume that our kids will make great carpenters and auto mechanics. That thinking is wrong, of course, the kids should not be deprived of educational opportunities due to their socioeconomic level but they are. The solution is simply to hire administrators who respect academics and behave like good academic role models.

Edit: I want to point out that there are many very high quality academic programs outside of school available so the 'lack of academic opportunity' I mentioned above applies to regular school hours.

[DaveJ]

16. I also want to point out...

Almost all the parents who want their kids to go to college move out of the city to the suburbs, or send their kids to private schools. In that case obviously the city school are then going to result in a low college bound ratio.

[AngryAmish]

17. What sort of parent do not want their kid to go to college?

I'm sure that they exist but if they do then they are awful people.

[unschooler]

20. Lots! In many communities, college is viewed with suspicion

and as a threat to a family's or a community's traditional way of life. My husband grew up in a white working-class area where a good job was a union job, and only a handful of people from his high school class actually graduated from college, all of them as adults who went back to school in their 20's or 30's after moving away from the community. My husband was one of those, and he gets no end of heckling from his old buddies (and their dads) when he visits. Unfortunately, most of those great union jobs are now gone, and the children of those proud but uneducated workers are struggling - but they still don't seem to think college is in the cards for their own kids.

[TexasLawyer]

18. nationally, 1 in 3

highschoolers now drop out, and do not even get a high school education, let alone college.

Welcome to our banana republic! It's only going to get worse.

[unschooler]

19. That's painting the school authorities with a rather broad brush,

don't you think?

Nobody cares about these children. This is especially true of the folks running the schools.

I guess the kids need to believe they CAN go to college, that, when they times comes, they will have what it takes, academically, psychologically and financially.

[DaveJ]

22. Allow me to be politically incorrect...

What if these kids are just lazy? They aren't automatons; they have minds of their own. Truthfully, I think a lot of them are. One of my kids' friends had every opportunity in the world to stay in school, he had support from his parents, a stable home, the school was putting absolutely no pressure on him, all he had to do basically was attend, and he just didn't feel like going (to High School, he just stopped going). I don't know why... it makes no sense. But there are a lot of distractions in the city. A lot of the kids would just rather hang out and sit on their butts, play video games, surf the web, etc., than do anything else. A lot of them simply don't care no matter how hard parents and teachers try to motivate them.

[unschooler]

23. I just can't believe 97% of colored inner city kids are lazy, while

60-80% of the white kids in the local upper middle class 'burb are making it on their superior energy and work ethic (and, yes, a lot of them sit on their white butts and play video games - and still finish college). There are plenty of distractions anywhere if you want to find them.