> craig miller wrote:
>
> I can't bite my tongue any longer. When your kids get to
> school age, you don't move. Stop blaming lack of
> affordable housing for poor school performance.
I know, Craig, that you feel blamed as a landlord around
this issue of affordable housing. However, what you're
demanding is fairly unreasonable.
> 1. Don't move when your kids hit school age.
> 2. Be settled when the time comes.
> 3. Don't get fired, if you do, get another job, eat
> crushed glass if you have to, sacrifice everything for
> the stability of your child's
> environment. I refuse to believe that 50% of the kids
> in MPS are victim to events beyond their parents control.
> The parents put
> these kids into that spot. We as society have to quit
> enabling these irresponsible parents.
> 4. Own a home when it comes time to start schooling your
> kids.
> 5. BTW In my old and new neighborhoods, the single
> parents are busting their A**ses to keep their kids in
> one spot.
These are some fairly unreasonable notions for our
population to live up to. Further, it is not true that if
you own a home that it will be enough to stabilize your kids
so they can learn. There are two homes on my block, owner
occupied. Each house has six or seven kids, most under the
age of 12. The parents both deal and use drugs and, from
their behavior, I'd say that either some of the kids were
crack babies, or the parental units are feeding them drugs
now. Two 9-yr. olds cannot read either "free" or "sofa."
They have the attention span of a flea. They go to
school--sometimes. One of the two runs a protection
racket. If you pay him for some work he won't vandalize
your property. The parents don't have much in the way of an
education either. Nor, from their actions, do they have any
idea how to change their lives for the better or the will to
do so.
On the other side of that, families who never owned a home
can produce children and rear them more than adequately.
Millions of people live in New York, London, Mexico City,
Calcutta and never own the domicile they live in. My parents
never owned a home. We moved periodically. We never had a
dime. My father was a petty criminal. After the parents
died, both my brother and I put ourselves through college.
Both of us have managed to stay employed since we were about
14. A generation later, I still don't have two nickles to
rub together, but I have not taken up "the family
business"--bookmaking, fencing, dealing a little dope. My
brother hasn't either, he's become a computer geek instead.
I think my parents were very strong in some ways, to pull
that off in the midst of bone-crushing poverty so that
their expectations of us--we were GOING to college period,
end of discussion--happened even after they died. (An aside,
"period. End of discussion" is a seldom-expressed notion in
Irish households.) It is unrealistic to expect that all the
homosapien sapiens will be equally strong, smart (if not
educated), practical, etc. Those qualities are unevenly
distributed throughout the gene pool.
It is not helpful, though it may be tempting, to make
unrealistic demands on fracturing families. The best we can
do, under our social system, is to try to be helpful.
Unfortunately, our system recognizes impersonalized
helpfulness--welfare--as the legitimate way to be helpful
and caring. It is neither of those. It can, at most, ward
off dispair for another day, another month. It takes
extra-ordinary strength of purpose and help from someone(s)
for people to pull themselves out of that hole of dispair.
The giant welfare buildings with the armed peace officer at
the door only serve to reinforce the dispair. The whole
ambience of the place is "if you are standing here, you have
failed as a person--you're out on your fanny in the snow.
Period. End of discussion." Faith and begora and kiss the
pope's foot, doncha know.
It seems it would be wonderful to live in the Garrison
Keillor shangrila (sp?) where all the women are strong..,
etc. And 'twould be lovely to lie abed all day waited on
hand and foot, eating bon-bons and having a mud bath.
WizardMarks, Central
Own a monster of a house on Lake Street which keeps 4 people
clean, warm, safe and dry and not stranded under a bridge
like the man without a country.
> Craig Miller
> Former Fultonite
> Camden's 3rd largest landlord
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Monday, June 04, 2001 2:19 PM
> Subject: Re: [Mpls] dropouts
>
> I promise the list members (and Mr. Atherton)
> that I won't bait him any more
> by saying that he relishes attention. And I'll
> leave the heroism of his posts
> to the judgment of others.
> I have done more than wonder why the graduation
> rate of the MPS is no more
> than 50 percent: I have identified what I
> believe to be a few root causes,
> including lack of affordable housing causing
> transiency, the cultural
> adjustment of immigration, the stresses and
> deficiencies associated with
> poverty. Mr. Atherton seems to believe these are
> not as germane to public
> school failure as is a self-perpetuating and
> inefficient bureaucracy staffed
> by incredibly cynical people out to save their
> own jobs at the cost of young
> peoples' education. I'll leave it to list
> members to determine whose
> viewpoint is more credible.
> Mr. Atherton does get somewhat specific in his
> explanation of continuation
> schools, but blithely states that because the
> kids fall under what would be
> classified as special education, then extra
> federal dollars would be
> forthcoming to pay for it. Right now, under the
> federal IDEA legislation for
> special education, the feds are supposed to be
> picking up 40 percent of the
> costs for their mandates. The actual federal
> dollars for these mandates
> amounts to only 15 percent of the cost. (I got
> my info from Nancy Reder at
> the National Association of State Directors of
> Special Education, Inc.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] And I won't even charge Mr.
> Atherton for the link!) Any of
> the self-serving education professionals Mr.
> Atherton decries will tell him
> that lack of federal monies for federal mandates
> is creating huge funding
> problems for the MPS and other schools. In other
> words, his solution isn't
> that simple.
> As for the war zone weblinks, Mr. Atherton
> introduced this area of discussion
> when he said something along the lines of "if
> children can learn in war
> zones, why can't they learn in the inner city?"
> I was merely trying to point
> out that they probably don't learn in war zones
> as well as Mr. Atherton would
> find acceptable, but since he included it in the
> discussion, he might feel
> otherwise. After all, the issue isn't whether
> there is "some learning" in war
> zones, the inner city, or the MPS, but whether
> the conditions involved make
> learning more difficult, and prohibitive for
> some children.
> Mr. Atherton's statement that "I'm not sure why
> it's relevant that I might
> redesign the schools in the image I would want
> for my child," is curious,
> since he lives in the MPS district and has
> obviously profound disagreements
> with the way the schools operate. Unless Mr.
> Atherton considers MPS reform a
> theoretical exercise, I would argue that it is
> highly relevant. For some of
> us, this is about more than other people's kids.
>
> List members are probably growing weary of this
> back and forth between Mr.
> Atherton and me--I think our areas of
> disagreement are pretty well stated.
> Any specific responses he wants to make to this
> post are welcome by me, and
> for my part will represent the last word on this
> particular thread.
>
> Britt Robson
> Lyndale
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