Success will be a tall order in a school district where 85 percent of some 32,000 students are a year and a half to two years below their grade level. In a typical district, the figure would be around 15 percent, said Paul G. Vallas, the new superintendent here.
Worse, a third of the students here are some four years below grade level, a challenge that Mr. Vallas, a veteran of the Chicago and Philadelphia schools, calls “extreme.”
Yet nearly a year into the job, Mr. Vallas professes to be unfazed. With no politics in his way ”” he answers neither to the neutered parish school board nor to the mayor, but to the state ”” he is far freer to plan grand schemes than in the much larger cities where he made his mark…
Mr. [Curtis] Sherrod’s class has made improvements in reading since the start of the school year, but the hurdles are real nonetheless.
“Most of the kids come from broken homes,” he said. “Their parents are dead, in jail or on drugs. You can tell the kids from two-parent homes. They’re getting straight A’s, and they are respectful.”
They are a minority, though. “The kids, for most of them, it’s no more than a social dating scene,” Mr. Sherrod said. “They don’t care about the work.”
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
“You can tell the kids from two-parent homes. They’re getting straight A’s, and they are respectful.â€
Probably 10 or 15 years ago now, a woman at my old law firm intentionally conceived and bore a child out of wedlock. The other women made the same joyful fuss over her that they would have if she’d been married (baby shower, flowers sent by the firm, etc.). I asked the firm administrator why this was so; she hemmed and hawed but had no real answer. For all I know it might have been illegal discrimination to do otherwise.
And let’s not even get into all the media’s matter-of-fact coverage of Hollywood types who have babies without bothering to marry their partner of the moment.
We certainly don’t want to penalize out-of-wedlock children for their parents’ poor choices. Even so, though, one wonders whether our collective unwillingness to disapprove publicly of out-of-wedlock childbearing might not lie at the root of many of our social problems.
Make that “disapprove publicly of out-of-wedlock parenthood“; unmarried fathers should be subject to just as much social disapproval as unmarried mothers.
DC at one time there was public disapproval. The progressives changed all that.
Br. Michael, I’m not sure I’d lay this at the feet of “progressives” so much as those of “the media” (WARNING: Sweeping generalization follows), which will gush over almost anything that attracts eyeballs to advertisements and/or helps to sell tickets/magazines.