"The state of black America."

More knowledge from the Field Negro education series:

"Last year was a year of great tumult in America. Income, education and equality gaps have remained steady. The voting rights of many Americans were eroded or greatly limited. And the killings of unarmed black men by police and later the lack of indictments in those killings sparked massive unrest, illuminating the trust gap between many communities of color and law enforcement.
Even as 2014 marked a year of momentous job growth, many have not seen their job and income prospects buoyed by the upsurge.

“The dark cloud inside this silver lining is that too many people are still being left behind,” Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, wrote in the organization’s 2015 State of Black America Report, the annual indexing of black and Latino equity in America.

I’d like to be here reporting to each and every one of you that equality is flourishing. I’d like to be here reporting that equal opportunity is abundant and flowing. I’d like to be able to say that racism is dead and gone forever and ever from American life,” Morial said during an event in Washington. “But the reality is that we cannot. And the reality is we have this obligation. This duty, this essential role to report the facts and the truth and how it is today even if those fact and that truth are extremely painful.”

The report, the “State of Black America – Save our Cities: Education, Jobs + Justice” was released on Thursday morning during the event. This year’s report, The National Urban League’s 39th, is available in an all-digital format featuring reports, graphs and articles.

The facts as stated in the report are mostly dismal and stark, particularly in terms of economic parity for blacks and Hispanics and whites. Despite 12 straight months of private sector job gains above 200,000 and a national unemployment rate of just 5.5%, the unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics in many of the country’s major metropolitan areas is as much as 3-to-1 or 4-to-1.
The numbers are even more disheartening in terms of the wealth gap. The net worth for African-Americans was $6,000, for Hispanics it was $7,000 and for whites it was $110,500.

The disparities weren’t, as some might intuit, limited to the gritty urban cores of the Northeast or impoverished areas of the South. San Francisco, which Morial described as a picturesque, “bastion of progressive politics,” ranked 70th out of 70 major metropolitan areas in medium income equality.

 

In that city, the average medium income for black households was just $39,000 compared to $95,000 for whites.

According to the report, which uses a formula of quantifiable factors to produce its equality index, African-Americans in 2014 were just 72% equal to whites with full equality between the two groups being 100%. Hispanics were slightly better at 78%.

The equality index included economics (black 55.8%, Hispanic 61.7%), health (black 79.8%, Hispanic 106.9%0, education (black 76.1%, Hispanic 74.6%), social justice (black 60.6%, Hispanic 72.7%) and civic engagement (black 104%, Hispanic 71%).
“Education is not the automatic great equalizer,” Morial said.

Even college educated African-Americans faced drastically higher unemployment rates compared to their white counterparts with the same level of educational attainment, according to the report.
Yet, even with the deep and lingering disparities 2014 was indeed a banner year in some educational aspects. The high school graduation rates for American students are the highest they’ve been in history, dropout rates are at historic lows and there are more students of color in college than ever before.

But in the aggregate of the broader indexing of education, employment and justice, the outlook for black and brown people remains troubling as ever.

“What do we say and how would we frame the state of black America for 2015,” Morial said. “I must use the word crisis.”

On the justice front fewer African-Americans were victims of violent crimes. There are more black lawmakers in Congress than ever before, 48. And the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has confronted misconduct by law enforcement and worked hard to improve police and community relations, Morial said.

Yet, 2014 was a watershed moment in the collision of violence and law enforcement.

Perhaps no incident of last year exemplified that crisis – in the confluence of income, housing and social justice concerns— as the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri and the local and national fallout that followed. Long before Brown’s killing by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson last August, the small city in the suburbs of St. Louis was rife with income inequality and deep residential segregation. While blacks made up the majority of the population there, the city’s leadership was majority white including nearly all of the police force, the city council and school board.

Brown’s killing sparked protests and riots that spilled nationwide that focused on state sanctioned violence against blacks but also the various inequities in the criminal justice system for African-Americans, in particular young black men.

The black community in Ferguson had “no role in their government, with no representation in their police department, so when the incident happened it was as Langston Hughes poems says, it exploded,” Morial said, referencing Hughes’s poem “A Raisin in the Sun.”

The Justice Department recently released a scathing report that outlined a broad pattern and practices of abuses and violations of both federal law and the constitutional rights of African-Americans by police.

“While America may have seen the reaction, the Justice Department report put a spotlight on a long system of practices in Ferguson, Missouri, there are Fergusons here and there are Fergusons there and there are Fergusons everywhere,” Morial said. “America today is a tale of two nations. It is a tale of two Americas. It is a tale of some who have achieved a great modicum of success, economic success, upward mobility, home ownership, a strong quality of life.

“It’s the product of their hard work, it’s a product of opportunity, a product of many factors,” Morial said. “But there is that America that is too black and too brown, not all black and all brown, but too black and too brown, which seems to be stuck on the other side, stuck on the other side of this great American divide.”' [Source]

Thank you for your contribution Mr. Lee.

Some real talk about education.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! High poverty rates affect school performance.

"In schools where less than 10 percent of students get free or reduced lunch, the reading score is 551. That would place those U.S. students at No. 2 on the international ranking for reading, just behind Shanghai, China which topped the ranking with a score of 556.

 In schools where 75 percent or more of the students get free or reduced lunch, the reading score was 446. That’s off the bottom of the charts, below last-place Greece’s 483.

Money matters and countless studies have demonstrated a link between parents’ income and students’ test scores.

“These data remind us that U.S. schools do rather well by students who come to school ready to learn, but it’s impossible to ignore the persistent correlation between poverty and performance." [Source]

Yes, I suppose it's hard to learn when you are hungry. Or, when you see your parent (or parents) struggling every day to make ends meet. But I think that most of us already knew this. Most of us.

I have friends who are lifelong residence of this city. They love Philadelphia and everything it has to offer, but after the birth of their first child that all changes, because the one thing that they do not love about Philadelphia is the public school system. With the birth of a child come tough choices down the road. Now you must consider paying for private school if your child can't get into one of the elite public schools. Now you must consider moving to the burbs (in some cases this means giving up your job) and pay higher property taxes to have the privilege of putting your child in one of the suburban public schools.

Those of us who support public education understand this problem. We realize that it's not the teachers or their unions, or the lack of funds that's allocated to individual students; it's bigger than that. We understand that a foundation for a good student starts at home. Most of the children in the public school system are from poor dysfunctional homes, and teaching them is a challenge. It's why we will never truly address the problem with public education in this country until we start being honest with ourselves about the root causes of most of these problems.

The homes are broken, there is a lack of parental involvement, and there is a generational disconnect about the value of a good education which is passed on from parent to child. I don't care how many great teachers you put in a class room or how much money you spend, the situation will not get fixed until those more complex and nuanced issues are addressed.

A friend of mine grew up in the projects of North Philadelphia to a single mother. He grew up poor with the same handicaps and disadvantages I mentioned earlier. But that did not stop him from getting Ivy League degrees and becoming a very successful attorney in South Jersey. His story is the one that we would like to celebrate as the norm, but sadly, he is an outlier, and one great story does not a trend make.

For what it's worth he said that he was never one to give in to peer pressure and outside influences. He always wanted more for himself, and he took it upon himself to spend his days reading and preparing himself for school even when his mother could not. He was self motivated, and something made the light come on.

For most of the young men in inner city Philadelphia and other cities across the country, that light will never come on. They will do poorly in poor schools, and they will be handed degrees that they do not deserve. They will spend their lives doing menial jobs, and, if they are lucky, they will avoid the criminal justice system. (Statistics tell us that most of these young men will not.)

For the women the prospects are not much better. They, too, will be doomed to a life of failure and underachievement. Statistics tell us that they will have a child out of wedlock, and more than likely it will be with someone who cannot care for that child.

Their life will be made that much harder of having the burden of raising a family without emotional and financial support, and unfortunately they will start the cycle of hopelessness all over again.

"As National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel explained:

The PISA test can still tell us many things, says NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, but the results are certainly not proof that we need to accelerate voucher programs, continue ineffective high-stakes testing, and scapegoat teachers. U.S. students won't rank higher on PISA, Van Roekel explains, until the nation properly addresses poverty and its effect on students. 

"Our students from well-to-do families have consistently done well on the PISA assessments. For students who live in poverty, however, it's a different story. Socioeconomic factors influence students' performance in the United States more than they do in all but few of the other PISA countries," says Van Roekel."

Yes we have to address poverty and "socioeconomic factors", but we are also going to need some real talk along the way.

One flew over the GOP nest.

"Freedom isn't to do whatever you want to do, it's to do what you ought to do" ..."

Huh? I told you all that Ricky [I should be in a] Sanitarium is crazy, but you wouldn't listen.

Folks, make no mistake, A Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium presidency would be scary for A-merry-ca.

I know all about Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium, I am from Pistolvania. He was one of our Senators here before we decided to throw his ass out by 16 percentage points. Now that he has a national stage the rest of A-merry-ca is finding out about the guy as well.

Comparing O to Hitler. Wanting to do away with federal AND state involvement with education. (Yes, Ricky would prefer if all the children in A-merry-ca were home schooled like his own. Shhhh, let's not mention the fact that he stole money from the people of Pistolvania while doing it.)Wanting to do away with pre-natal care for pregnant women, and calling the religion of the president of these divided states "phony." Wow! This all makes him declaring contraception harmful to women seem like the norm. I will give Ricky credit; he is doubling down on crazy.

"The idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not."

"Anachronistic" Rick? Oh the irony. Folks, believe me, if there is anything that belongs in another time it's Rick [I should be in a] Sanitarium.

"There's nothing - there's no gift, no Christmas gift, that could be given better than Rick Santorum to the Democrats,"

I know that they don't believe me, but I want to say this to my republican friends in all sincerity: If Donald Trump believes that the guy heading for the nomination of your party is unelectable, just what do you think a normal person in A-merry-ca is thinking about him? Think about it.







       

Solving the education problem.

*

It's nice to see that public education is getting so much attention in A-merry-ca these days. We can thank my man from Facebook and his one hundred million dollar gift for that. Lord knows that it needs to. I think folks are starting to realize that it's everybody's problem. Even those of us who don't have children. Maybe we can start tackling the causes of the problem and not the symptoms for once. (Thanks Dan) BTW, let me just leave this link for you haters out there who think that black children are somehow genetically inferior to those kids from the majority population. Thank you.

Anyway, I think I have a simple solution to the education problem in poor inner city and rural neighborhoods here in the land of the [some are] free. Now please believe that I did not come to this lightly. It took years of working in urban A-merry-ca with some of these children as a volunteer, a court administrator, and as a professional in private practice.

So here goes: Tie performance and attendance in school to tax breaks and more public assistance benefits-if they are receiving it- to the families of these children. That's it. It's that simple. If, for instance, the little rugrat is making all A's and is attending at least 95% of his or her classes for most of the school year. His mother or father (whoever is working at least 25 hours per week in the home) would not pay state (Keeping in mind, of course, that there is no national curriculum in A-merry-ca, and the feds are not responsible for education. Still, the feds could be involved as well, if the federal government gave money to the states which were armarked for this program.) income taxes on their salary for that year. They would send proof of the rugrats performance with their state tax returns. If the family receives food stamps or cash assistance they would get an additional food stamp voucher or cash benefits when they bring proof of their little rugrats performance to the local welfare office.

Let's face it, folks, all the great teaching in the world will not change how some of these children perform if they do not get motivated at home and learn to value education. These children are starting behind the eight ball because of the environment that they are coming from. Many of them have zero college graduates in their families or their neighborhoods. So the educational value system that some of us talk so freely about and take for granted is a foreign concept to them. Chris Crisco can keep beating up on the teacher's unions in Jersey to show off to his GOP friends, it won't do any good. It might get him political Brownie points, but ten years from now schools in places like Camden and Jersey City will still be f*&^%d up.

Maybe, just maybe, with some kind of financial incentive, the person in the home charged with making decisions that affects their child's life will do the right thing.

Arne, that was free.

BTW, what is wrong with the *picture above?

An education agenda is a terrible thing to waste.

*

You all need to stop sending me links like this. A brother is trying to concentrate on writing his post. Eco Soul, I have mad love for you, and I know the point of your post was sisters getting their work out on, but sometimes a picture can get in the way, if you know what I am "sayin".

Anyway, let me stop before folks start calling me James Vine. James, you are one sick dude.

Anywhooo, tonight I am not going to chase my man racism. He is too easy to catch. Hell, when he starts f#*&^%g with black celebrities without a care in the world, I might as well leave his ass alone. There is nothing I can do from here, so go on with your bad self Big R. It's your world.

I do want to talk about a serious subject, and if we overcome it, we can tell Big R to kiss our collective black asses. Why? Because then it really won't matter what he does; we will already have ours, and thanks to the laws in this great country, there is not a damn thing he will be able to do about it.

The serious problem is education; or a lack of it among young black males. I heard Brian Williams yapping about it on NBC Nightly News, and I already knew there was a problem, but damn! Only forty seven percent of black males are graduating high school in this country. And, in my hometown of Philly- and in places like New York- it's twenty seven percent. Now that is some scary stuff. Oh we talk about it, and we are aware of it, but can we really do anything about it?

I know one thing; the HNIC's that are in charge aren't doing the job. It's one fancy program after another, and none of it is doing any damn good. "No Child Left Behind";"Race To The Top", what's the difference? None of them are working. I suspect that the folks implementing these programs with their fancy Ed.D's and assortment of letters have no clue about motivating young black men to learn. A think tank here, a think tank there, and people trying to score cheap political points at the expense of our children.

Some programs, to be sure, have been working. Urban Prep in Chicago comes to mind. And apparently the charter schools up in Harlem are kicking butt. So, help me out here, why aren't the folks who were instrumental in starting some of these schools not in serious decision making positions in Washington? Whose job is it to find these people and put the brightest and hardest working people together to come up with solutions? One problem, to be sure, is ego. I have been in the room and seen the my degree is better than yours interplay that takes place among folks who are supposed to be about the business of educating. It's depressing. And folks like me who -just want to give a helping hand- throw our hands up and say f*&k it! That's almost where I was, (almost) until I watched Brian Williams yapping about it on Nightly News, as if it was all taking place in some foreign country and not right in his back yard. (Well, not his back yard, but you know what I am saying; it's here in A-merry-ca. )

Education is still the great equalizer, and it's time these youngsters realise it.

*Pic lifted from a wingnut website. Sorry, I don't remember the name.

If a child falls in the hood and no one cares to hear about it....

..should we make a sound? Of course we should. We owe our children that much.

As my man Reggie Warrington [Dave Chappelle] told Buddy Love [Eddie Murphy] in the Nutty Professor; "it's time to attack black."

So here we go again. It seems like every now and then I have to go on one of these rants. My Killadelphia murder count on the sidebar of this blog is not enough. Black folks, unfortunately, have become numb to the senseless killing of our children by our children. So what if three more young men were murdered this past week in Philly? Or if well over thirty school aged children have been murdered in Chicago this year? (How come Oprah doesn't have a show about that? I guess Dr. Phil doesn't do grief counseling) We have come to expect it.

But every now and then there is a murder that shocks our collective conscience and plays itself into the national psyche. Instead of a line or two in the metro page of the local paper, it makes national news. Bryan Williams is talking about it, and middle A-merry-cas is watching it with their hands over their mouths. In the hood people are wondering what's the big deal. How come this one made the national news and all the others didn't?

Well maybe it's because this one played itself out on video like a twisted reality television show for all of us to see. -And in the president's hometown no less- Urban terrorist beating a young honor student to death. No remorse, no heart, and no hesitation. Like a pack of animals who have strayed far away from their human DNA. You have all seen the video by now. If you haven't maybe you should. And when you do, take a long hard look at those those urban terrorist and try to find something. Maybe a clue as to why they act the way that they do. Something. Anything. I looked. In fact, I am always looking.

Here is what I see whenever I look: Children-wait, I take that back; boys without fathers. Young men with no men in their lives. Young men being raised by the streets and all sorts of negative influences. Most of them are here compliments of some sperm donor who just kept getting up. Absent fathers who thought that mom had a fat ass and was a "hell a nice shot".

I never see those sperm donors in criminal court when the cases are being called and the defendant's are being led into the courtroom. Only girlfriends, grandmothers, and mothers. The only black males I see in the court rooms are the sheriffs. When I go into the home of a potential client, the only people I negotiate with are mothers and grandmothers. Again, there is never a sperm donor in sight. That is my reality, and it's better than any scientific study you can cook up from some fancy Ivy League school. Oh field, stop it, what do you expect these men to do? What about the women who hook up with them? What about them? I can't speak for the women. All I know is that more often or not she is the one left to raise the child by herself. The sperm donor is always long gone and nowhere around. Regardless of who zoomed who.

I am so sick of seeing the vigils, the teddy bears, and the prayer groups in front of crime scenes. Because the sad reality is that tomorrow, just like clockwork, some poor child will be snatched from us by an urban terrorist all over again.

Today, Al Sharpton,Newt Gingrich, and Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, toured the schools here in Philly. (Talk about strange bedfellows)They were here to praise the charter school system in our fine city and push for longer hours in school. That's all fine. But our schools could stay open twenty four hours a day and it wouldn't make a damn difference to the urban terrorist out here. The kids who want to learn will be there, and the others will keep doing what they are doing now: be disruptive, make it harder for the other kids, and create a poor overall learning environment.

But let's keep it real with each other. The schools can only do so much. Everything starts at home.

I know that I am preaching to the choir here, because most of you who read this blog with children don't need to here this. I am sure that your children are fine. But what about the rest of them? All of our children. A-merry-ca's children. (Well, black A-merry-ca's children, because I am quite sure that the rest of A-merry-ca would never claim them. They would much rather adopt a nice little Asian or Russian girl...let me stop.) How do we get to them? How do we stop the sperm donors? It's, for the most part, a question that is orotund in nature. Because as much as I have tried to figure it out, I swear that I don't know the answer.

Obama, don't you have little poor and inner city kids you could be talking to? Your speech should be on BET and TV One, nowhere else.

*

Is that tire marks I see on Van Jone's back? I know I know, no one in the White House asked him step down, he just didn't want to be a distraction from the president's agenda. Yeah right.

Anyway, I am not writing about that tonight. It's a victory for the wingnuts, and I don't want to think about wingnut victories right now.

What I want to write about is the outrage over his O ness speaking to all those school children all over A-merry-ca. Conservatives are breathing fire over this one. Who the hell does this Obama guy think he is? They are saying. He might have been elected president, but he is not really our president.

"Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. "I'm an American. They are Americans, and I don't feel that's OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now."

There are a lot Sharon Barrons all over A-merry-ca. The very thought of his O ness talking to her kids about anything scares the blue right out of her eyes. One Florida GOP Chairman, Jim Greer, basically came right out and said that his O ness is pushing a "Socialist ideology" on A-merry-ca's children.

"As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," Greer said.
"The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the president justify his plans ... is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power."

Hold up. Didn't the fake ass cowboy from California deliver a political speech to school children?

Yes, I think he did. And I think it got far more political than any speech his O ness could ever give. But hey, Reagan isn't a Socialist with an African father and a funny name. He, my friends, was a real A-merry-can.

And then, of course, there was the first Bush, who gave a speech to the kids as well. I tried to remember if there was this type of outrage over any of those speeches, and I am comfortable in saying that there was not. Consider, some wingnuts are actually saying that this talk by his O ness to the kids violates the constitution. They are saying that this president's access to communications is "dangerous". Dangerous? Isn't he the president of the United States of America? How dangerous can he be since we elected him?

But I get it. Barack Hussein Obama is not a legitimate president as far as these people are concerned, because they still cannot stomach the fact that he is their chosen leader and the most powerful person in their beloved country. This is not about his politics, it's about him. Had this been Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or Al Gore, we would not even be having this discussion. You know it and so do the other 300 million plus people in this country. Let's just go ahead and keep it real with each other: This is about the president's race and nothing else. The last thing white folks want (present company excluded of course) is this Negro talking to their children. " He can go talk to his kids or kids who need to be told about getting an education. My kids know the value of an education." That is what one man from the majority population was saying on the news the other night. And believe me, I got his message loud and clear. I am just amazed that folks in the White House do not.

Honestly, a lot of these political mistakes could be avoided by his O ness if he would just surround himself with more people who understand the real A-merry-ca and aren't buying into this "post-racial" crap.

"The President is a political leader. He is not in office to be an educator. His duties are clearly laid out, and they do not include educating children. By the same token, the President is not the parent of all these children. He is not their teacher. He is not their religious leader. The reason for these boundaries is so that political figures do not use their power and influence to dominate our social lives. It is a special danger to liberty and society when national powers are developed. These are powers in which the national leadership directly controls or influences individual citizens, while bypassing or circumventing other local sources of governance and influence such as parents, families, churches, schools, and local governments."

Who says he is not a "religious leader"? I bet that author has never attended the church of Obama?

*Pic courtesy og 3.bp.blog

"No Excuses"

I just caught his O ness doing his thing at the NAACP gathering in New York, (I wonder how many more of those will be coming here in A-merry-ca? Happy 100th B-Day NAACP. Now if you could just become relevant again. Digression alert!)and I must say that I was impressed. Yeah it was Cosbyish in its tone, but a lot of what he said needed to be said. We needed to hear it from the President. I am glad he didn't go in there trying to talk policy and democratic talking points. That would have been be too much like preaching to the choir. Black folks don't want to hear politics and Washington inside baseball, they want their president to speak to them about issues that are personal to their community. On that front I thought he delivered. The "Amen Corner" was in full effect, so you know he was reaching them.

“There is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child’s God-given potential,”

Education education education. A black leader cannot stress that enough for me. That is now the number one civil rights issue as far as I am concerned. But around the issue of education are many other complex issues as well. Issues such as failing schools, crime, broken families, a failing justice system, and policies from Washington that makes it harder for certain communities to gain access to funding. His O ness didn't bite his tongue when he admonished black parents to do right by their children and make sure that they are being educated in the right way. He stressed that we must give them every chance to succeed, and that there must be "no excuses."

Of course, it's easy for those of us who were fortunate enough to be given the right opportunities and who were blessed to be raised in a black version of Mayberry R.F.D. to talk. I grew up in a family of four and three of them had PhD's. For me, there was no doubt that I was going to further my education, and I had parents and a sister who set great examples for me. I can't even begin to imagine how tough it must be for a single mother of three, for instance, to try and raise her children in inner city_____________[fill in the blank with any city you want.] It has to be tough. Your kid's father is dead, in jail, or just a dead-beat, and you are holding it down all by your lonesome. A million speeches by his O ness won't make it easier for that single mother struggling in the hood to cope with her circumstances. But policies from Washington that raises that minimum wage and allows her to afford proper health care will. Still, she has to try. That's why that speech was so important. She has to realize that one of her children could one day be the person behind that podium with the presidential seal giving that speech. Those single parents and community activists are our new MLK's. They are on the front lines of the civil rights struggle now. It's up to them; not the leaders we elect, or the folks who hold themselves up as our leaders, (see Rev. inc.) to take the lead in inspiring these kids out here.

Tomorrow morning I will be speaking to some kids at an elementary school in North Philadelphia. I think I will start by asking them if they heard the president's speech tonight. I know only a couple of hands will go up, and then I will ask the rest of the kids why they missed it. The various reasons they give me will be a great jumping off point for the rest of my discussion. A discussion, to me, that will be all too familiar.

BTW, I couldn't sign off tonight without hollering at my man racism, again. Looks like he isn't even running from me anymore. In fact, I think the SOB is starting to chase me. :)

"ATLANTA — Former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller criticized President Barack Obama's recent travels overseas, telling a group of mostly Republican lawmakers Thursday that the White House Chief of Staff needs to put "Gorilla Glue" on Obama's chair to keep him in the Oval Office.
"Our globe-trotting president needs to stop and take a break and quit gallivanting around..."

Oh Zell, shut up, you are just trying to get attention. And racism, you are way too slow, you will never catch me, not after that speech by his O ness. I am inspired!

Promoting away an education.

"The pressure to pass students - even those who rarely go to class or can't read - is pervasive in the Philadelphia School District, teachers around the city say. The push comes in memos, in meetings, and in talks about failure rates that are too high, the teachers say. It comes through mountains of paperwork and justification for failing any student. It comes in ways subtle and overt, according to more than a dozen teachers from nine of the city's 62 high schools."

'We have to give fake grades," said a teacher at Mastbaum High in Kensington. "The pressure is very real..."' The thing is, we're not asked to educate our kids. We're asked to pass them," the Gratz teacher said. At Olney West, a teacher said she had received warning calls after failing students.'I'll get a phone call saying, 'Are you sure he earned a 58? Are you sure it wasn't a 65?' the teacher said. 'To me, if a student has 80 absences, the question should be, 'Why did they pass? and not, What are you doing so they don't fail?' "

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am totally against social promotions. I think it is one of the things destroying many of our inner city schools. Teachers have a hard job, and if anyone says that they aren't, for the most part, underpaid, that person must be living on the planet Dreamland. Read the quotes from some of our teachers under siege (and not from students per se. But from administrators and bureaucrats) here in Philly again. Is it any wonder that our murder rate is where it is?

The quotes in the first rwo paragraphs were taken from a Philadelphia Inquirer article which dealt with the subject. Clearly there is a problem in our schools with social promotions, and teachers and other educational professionals are finally speaking out about it.

Of course, as with most of these types of issues, there are two different points of views. There are some people who take the opposite view and who actually argue that social promotions are good. How else, they argue, would these students be able to graduate from their respective schools? Not socially promoting them could devastate them psychologically and do more harm than good in the long run. The dropout rates would be huge, and the end result would be children with no shot at getting even what would be considered a low paying job.

Well, I am not buying it. The kids who are socially promoted do no better in the long run than if they had been held back. Of course the social promotion advocates disagree:"They never really catch up.... They are stigmatized, and that makes it worse." So says one Ivy League expert on the subject. And my question to that would be how and when are they going to catch up if we just give them a degree and send them off into the world? Sorry, I am not buying it.

Of course the real problem is that many of these kids are coming from homes which makes it so much worse for them from the jump. Their backgrounds are so messed up and full of obstacles that by the time they get to school learning plays second fiddle to just surviving. But I am sorry, these kids usually hold back the kids who really want to learn, and they can be disruptive to a good classroom environment when they do decide to come to school.

So in the end, my position on this issue might seem harsh, because it would seem as if I am not considering these other variables, but I am. It's exactly why I would would hold these children back and work harder to educate them and prepare them for a future in the work place. Hey, I know that when it comes to this issue I come down on the same side with the folks from The Manhattan Institute , for crying out loud, but sometimes good ideas makes strange bedfellows.

Before I go, this is a good time to segue into the next subject; a tribute to my father.

He was the smartest man I ever knew, but he never acted like it. He knew famous and powerful people, but he was most comfortable with the people you and I would pass on the street everyday and not even know they were there. He was loved and respected by more people than I will ever know in my life, and to this day, because of the legacy he left me, I am treated by the people who knew him with the kind of respect that I could never earn for myself.

He believed in education, family, and hard work. And he believed in treating others like he would want them to treat him.

Finally, he taught me to respect people for who they were and not for what they had.

Thanks Dad. You raised me in the house, but you gave me a value system straight from the fields.

Happy Father's Day!

Our own soft racism

This post is going to piss off some of you black folks, but as usual, I really don't give a f**k.

I am going to use a sports analogy with this one so stay with me.

 

When the Phillies clinched the National League East division championship, the folks here lost their freaking minds. You would have thought we won the World Series or some shit. The folks here are so starved for a championship that we  acted as if just winning the division was the championship. Wall to wall celebrations and damn near rioting in the streets.

Of course, the Phillies then went out and promptly lost three in a row to the Colorado Rockies. Bye bye championship.

 

Now for my analogy: Earlier this summer I was in a restaurant with some friends when in walked a family of my cousins. They were upbeat and excited and from the looks of things, in full celebration mode. I noticed that two of the young people with the family were still wearing their high school graduation gowns, as well as their graduation caps. The other members of the family were taking picture after picture and relishing in the young people's achievement. "So field what's wrong with that?" Nothing, and the family should have been proud. But let's stay with my Phillies analogy a little bit. They should have been proud, but like the Phillies, these young people did not win the World Series, all they had just won was the divisional championship. There were other steps to go, other educational goals to achieve, but the way this family was acting you would think that this was it; that they had reached the pinnacle. Sadly for them, --and the statistics here in Philly and other places will confirm this-- they probably had. More than likely both of those young people would not be going on to college or furthering their education. This was it for them, and damn it, the family was going to let it all hang out on this grand occasion.

 

Folks, this might be the first and last time you will hear me say that the frat boy was right about something. But he was right about the "soft racism of low expectations." It's there and it's real, and our own families are sometimes guilty of perpetrating it. We don't help by treating the first step in a long process as if it's the end. It's not the end. Getting your high school diploma is something you are supposed to do, and it should be expected, not celebrated.

Honestly, I don't even think my father went to my high school graduation, because there was never any doubt that my ass was going to college. The celebration could wait for bigger things. To him, a high school diploma was a right of passage, something akin to getting a driver's license. I thought about that as I watched this family celebrating like there was no tomorrow, and showering the new graduates with unbridled adoration. "But field what if they are the first in their families to graduate high school, what if it is a big deal to this family." I know, and that's the really sad part of this conundrum isn't it. The fact that there are so many families out here where this might be true, and, like the Phillies, their celebration will be short lived.