Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Newest Civil Right--The Right To Attend A Bad School

You can't make stuff like this up:
Closing or reorganizing low-performing urban schools discriminates against black and Hispanic students whose schools are most likely to be targeted, charge community activists in the Journey for Justice Movement.

Closing neighborhood schools is “a violation of our human rights,” said Jitu Brown, an organizer from the South Side of Chicago, in a meeting with Education Secretary Arne Duncan yesterday.
As I said in my comment at the end of that post:
Maybe they’re tacitly admitting that the *school* isn’t the root cause of the poor performance.
It's the culture.

1 comment:

allen (in Michigan) said...

Naw, I think it's the institution.

Those standards that've been causing such angst lately are viewed as a goal the achievement of which is all that's necessary rather then a minimum to be surpassed with as wide a margin as possible.

If the Olympics were run the same way as public education everyone would get a gold medal for merely showing up and the pursuit of first place would be viewed as as an inexplicable, unnecessary and somewhat embarrassing exertion of a very few.