Tyrone N. Butts
APE Reporter
16
What's the problem with schools? Declining moral values, that's what
After poring over the Herald-Tribune's recent package of stories on teachers and schools, one conclusion stands out:
We need a revolution. Not a revolution in the schools, where they will do what they can with what they are given, but a revolution at the heart of the problem: society's 40-year dalliance with a destructive, morally laissez-faire agenda.
Maybe more than a new revolution, we need to go back to a fork in the road where we took the wrong path, a decision for which generations keep paying.
The six-day series of stories gave a fairly exhaustive look at the surprisingly high percentage of teachers failing the state's teacher tests and went into great depth
comparing "have" districts with better teachers in wealthier schools
with "have-not" districts of lower quality teachers in poorer schools.
While it is helpful to have the firm results of those numbers, they represent what common sense suggested all along: Good teachers with a choice largely want to teach in schools where students come prepared, wanting to learn.
The problem and solution does not start with teachers, nor with wealth, although both can contribute.
The have and have-not package painted the picture of a duel between rich schools and poor schools.
While that is true, that is not the underlying difference, as administrators and teachers at even the poor schools pointed out.
They gave voice to the elephant in the living room that we are uncomfortable acknowledging or confronting: The problem starts and ends at home where family decay has mirrored moral decay.
"Usually, the parents are the child's first teacher. But that's no
t the case here," said Sandra Cook, a fifth-grade teacher and 30-year veteran at Laura C. Saunders Elementary School in a
n economically poor section of south Miami-Dade.
Hand in hand with the poor are disinterested parents who simply make one bad decision after another and are excused for it and bailed out.
Cook said most parents won't even put their phone number on the emergency contact card. "Most of the parents don't like to be called. And sometimes when they do put a number, it is a fake."
Astounding. Where did this monumental indifference to parenting come from?
From taking the wrong fork in the road.
The turn came from the excesses born in the '60s, which called for free love, free sex, free drugs, a free ride on the Great Society, the philosophy of do what
. . . what feels good to you, and a feminism that burned its bras and thumbed its nose at commitment -- an arrangement readily accepted by males who were also throwing off tradition
al constraints and responsibilities.
These were the seeds sown down the wrong path.
Fast forward to a time now when children come to school not from broken ho
mes -- they have not been right for generations -- but often from a home with a mom on welfare from the government and siblings from multiple fathers, whose role models include crotch-grabbing rappers, rich drug dealers, spoiled felonious sports stars and the rest of the culture.
The theme? Let me break the taboo and say it: Dramatically declining morals.
Yeah, we've come a long way, baby. We sowed it. And we continue to reap it. And we want to blame it on teachers?
For too long, societal leaders in academia, media and government have said that there is nothing wrong with this path. That time needs to end.
There remains racism, and perhaps even some very slim vestiges of slavery. But those vestiges are nothing in comparison to the ravages that have been brought on by that wrong turn in the road.
***********
The problem is niggers but it is politically incorrect to say so.
T.N.B.
What's the problem with schools? Declining moral values, that's what
After poring over the Herald-Tribune's recent package of stories on teachers and schools, one conclusion stands out:
We need a revolution. Not a revolution in the schools, where they will do what they can with what they are given, but a revolution at the heart of the problem: society's 40-year dalliance with a destructive, morally laissez-faire agenda.
Maybe more than a new revolution, we need to go back to a fork in the road where we took the wrong path, a decision for which generations keep paying.
The six-day series of stories gave a fairly exhaustive look at the surprisingly high percentage of teachers failing the state's teacher tests and went into great depth
comparing "have" districts with better teachers in wealthier schools
with "have-not" districts of lower quality teachers in poorer schools.
While it is helpful to have the firm results of those numbers, they represent what common sense suggested all along: Good teachers with a choice largely want to teach in schools where students come prepared, wanting to learn.
The problem and solution does not start with teachers, nor with wealth, although both can contribute.
The have and have-not package painted the picture of a duel between rich schools and poor schools.
While that is true, that is not the underlying difference, as administrators and teachers at even the poor schools pointed out.
They gave voice to the elephant in the living room that we are uncomfortable acknowledging or confronting: The problem starts and ends at home where family decay has mirrored moral decay.
"Usually, the parents are the child's first teacher. But that's no
t the case here," said Sandra Cook, a fifth-grade teacher and 30-year veteran at Laura C. Saunders Elementary School in a
n economically poor section of south Miami-Dade.
Hand in hand with the poor are disinterested parents who simply make one bad decision after another and are excused for it and bailed out.
Cook said most parents won't even put their phone number on the emergency contact card. "Most of the parents don't like to be called. And sometimes when they do put a number, it is a fake."
Astounding. Where did this monumental indifference to parenting come from?
From taking the wrong fork in the road.
The turn came from the excesses born in the '60s, which called for free love, free sex, free drugs, a free ride on the Great Society, the philosophy of do what
. . . what feels good to you, and a feminism that burned its bras and thumbed its nose at commitment -- an arrangement readily accepted by males who were also throwing off tradition
al constraints and responsibilities.
These were the seeds sown down the wrong path.
Fast forward to a time now when children come to school not from broken ho
mes -- they have not been right for generations -- but often from a home with a mom on welfare from the government and siblings from multiple fathers, whose role models include crotch-grabbing rappers, rich drug dealers, spoiled felonious sports stars and the rest of the culture.
The theme? Let me break the taboo and say it: Dramatically declining morals.
Yeah, we've come a long way, baby. We sowed it. And we continue to reap it. And we want to blame it on teachers?
For too long, societal leaders in academia, media and government have said that there is nothing wrong with this path. That time needs to end.
There remains racism, and perhaps even some very slim vestiges of slavery. But those vestiges are nothing in comparison to the ravages that have been brought on by that wrong turn in the road.
***********
The problem is niggers but it is politically incorrect to say so.
T.N.B.