Woman jailed for sending her kids to a school out of her district.

B_VinylBoy

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Vinylboy, I also grew up in Massachusetts. May I ask what city you grew up in? I grew up in Salem.

No kidding! I went to college at Salem State... or "seldom straight" depending on who you talk to. :biggrin1:

I was born in Mattapan, grew up most of my life in Dorchester & Roxbury, then spent my first few adult years in the South End & the Fenway before moving to New York. But all through elementary, middle & high school I commuted to Braintree through a program you may have heard of called METCO.
 

D_Rosalind Mussell

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No kidding! I went to college at Salem State... or "seldom straight" depending on who you talk to. :biggrin1:

I was born in Mattapan, grew up most of my life in Dorchester & Roxbury, then spent my first few adult years in the South End & the Fenway before moving to New York. But all through elementary, middle & high school I commuted to Braintree through a program you may have heard of called METCO.

Holy shit, you went to school about a mile from my house. Small world! We're the same age, so I wouldn't be surprised if we knew some of the same people. I lived in Salem until my mother moved us to Lynn the summer before high school. If you know anything about Lynn then you know why my mother kept me out of those schools. I never heard of METCO and I'm not sure if my mother did. If we had, we would have used it to keep me in the Salem school system legally after we moved. I grew up in Salem's ghetto but I loved it. Bad stuff happened but a lot of families knew each other and we watched out for everyone. Ironically, I was more protected there than if I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. I've heard lots of horror stories about Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury but I went there because I didn't have a need to. I had a couple of friends in Southie and visited them sometimes but I mostly stuck to Back Bay, Theater District, Downtown Crossing and the North End. So did you like Salem? Some love it because of the culture, others hate it for the tourism.

Sorry, hijacked thread...back to your regularly scheduled program.
 

maxcok

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Just want to be crystal clear here, and not picking on you/your post specificially, and I think you are generalizing (which is fine), but the "schools just need more money, throw more at them and they will be fixed" doesn't work, hasn't worked, etc. It only goes so far.
I was generalizing, that should be obvious, but I didn't say anything close to "schools just need more money, throw more at them and they will be fixed". Stop exaggerating and mischaracterizing what I say, and stop taking it out of context. Drifter, who is not a resident of the US, asked for clarification about how school funding was generated and distributed, and I answered as well as I could within my understanding of what is "typical". I also invited anyone who was "more expert" on the subject to chime in.

I don't believe that anything in my post was inaccurate, but if you know better, feel free to correct me and cite information to the contrary. The fact is, better neighborhoods typically have much more money for schools, and they typically have much better schools. It's a matter of gross inequality, and I don't think it's debatable. That's kind of the whole point behind this story: a mother living in public housing breaks the law to send her daughters to school in a better neighborhood, so maybe they'll have better opportunities in life than she did.

Local and family culture carries much more weight. Algebra hasn't changed much in the last, oh few centuries. I don't care how old the book is. I know I'm oversimplifying it, but here in California I see the converse of "$$$ = better results".
Algegra may not have changed, but what has changed in the past 30-40 years is this: Education budgets have been steadily slashed and/or failed to keep up with inflation, as a correlative of Republican sponsored tax cuts. Standardized testing has become the measure of 'success', focused mainly on basic math and English language proficiency, and to a lesser degree science. Meanwhile, such "non-essentials" like phys ed, athletics, after school programs, foreign languages, art, music, humanities in general, social sciences, and of particular note civics and history, have all been deemphasized, cut back, or eliminated altogether to balance the budgets. To my mind, unless an education is well-rounded, unless it's interdisciplinary and teaches you how to think, and to think critically, it's not really an education, it's basic training in basic drone proficiency. That's what the lack of funding and overemphasis on standardized testing in a few core subject areas has resulted in, and schools in poorer neighborhoods have typically felt much more of the pinch than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

I agree with noirman and NCBear in their thoughtful posts, that it's not just the quality of the schools, but the surrounding environment and the involvement of parents that make the difference as well. But when the surrounding environment is a war zone, and single parents are working two or three low paying jobs to stay afloat, it's a lot harder to be engaged in your kids' education than it is if you live in a plush gated community, and the most challenging thing on your agenda is driving your kids to soccer practice in one of the family's three or four SUV's. If a child lives in a depressed dangerous environment, and the parents are too busy with survival issues to be as involved as they might like, all the more reason that school should be an anchor, a refuge from the surrounding chaos, and a bridge to a better life in the future.

Is more funding for schools the answer? It's not the whole answer by any means, but better funding overall, and more equitable funding, is at least part of the answer, imho.


Footnote observation: To see what an utter failure our education system is, even with the greatest emphasis on basic English, math and science proficiency, one need only look at the posts on this board from younger members -- in awareness, in content, and most obviously, in the way they are expressed and written. There are some very bright, well educated, aware and articulate young people here, but they are a small minority.
 
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B_VinylBoy

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Holy shit, you went to school about a mile from my house. Small world! We're the same age, so I wouldn't be surprised if we knew some of the same people. I lived in Salem until my mother moved us to Lynn the summer before high school. If you know anything about Lynn then you know why my mother kept me out of those schools. I never heard of METCO and I'm not sure if my mother did. If we had, we would have used it to keep me in the Salem school system legally after we moved. I grew up in Salem's ghetto but I loved it. Bad stuff happened but a lot of families knew each other and we watched out for everyone. Ironically, I was more protected there than if I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. I've heard lots of horror stories about Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury but I went there because I didn't have a need to. I had a couple of friends in Southie and visited them sometimes but I mostly stuck to Back Bay, Theater District, Downtown Crossing and the North End. So did you like Salem? Some love it because of the culture, others hate it for the tourism.

Sorry, hijacked thread...back to your regularly scheduled program.

It's possible that we may have knew a few people. I did live on campus for a few years, but then commuted from Boston for my final years. I used to always go to Salem Willows Arcade with a few of my dorm buddies because we were all closeted computer and gaming nerds. It was always exciting around Salem during Halloween for obvious reasons. Salem State was an OK school, but I really wished I went to one of the two other schools I got accepted to instead (Syracuse or Tuskeege). Part of me wasn't ready to go too far from home and wanted to be near if there was ever an emergency, but I digress...

Mattapan (sometimes called "Murderpan") and Roxbury had some rough neighborhoods. Dorchester was pretty good if you lived on the right side of town. Some stretches of blocks (near Ashmont) were full of very well kept houses & streets. Other areas closer to Dudley had several blocks that looks like the movie set from "Boyz In Da Hood". Despite the reputations these areas had, it wasn't as if you had to duck your head every other block or worry about a drive-by. As long as you stuck to the main roads, used public transportation or hailed a cab when it got too dark and stayed out of the projects (unless absolutely necessary) you were fine. And that's enough of the thread hijack for now. :biggrin1:

To maxcok & NCbear - You're really making great points in this thread. :wink:
 

helgaleena

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School districts have a procedure for sending your child out of district. You have to fill out their forms and jump through their hoops. It's the same if you decide to home-school your children.

Whatever this woman did, she didn't follow procedure.

When my family moved from one school district to another, I was able to continue my kids in the old, better district by filling out the paperwork.
 

B_VinylBoy

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School districts have a procedure for sending your child out of district. You have to fill out their forms and jump through their hoops. It's the same if you decide to home-school your children.

Whatever this woman did, she didn't follow procedure.

It's actually a more common thing these days than I ever realized. By hook or by crook, many families are looking for ways to get their children into better public schools. Here's a report from one state about that very subject - More students choicing out of district | EdNewsColorado

We really need to address the core issues of the poorer neighborhoods of our country so that we can cut down the number of cases surrounding this problem.
 

NCbear

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To maxcok & NCbear - You're really making great points in this thread. :wink:

I'd include every contributor to this thread in that group of "people making good points," actually.

One example is faceking's and maxcok's statements proving the value of good parenting.

Another is BBW36's comments about how the urban environments can be safer, if there's a true feeling of community, than suburban environments.

And of course helgaleena makes a great point about a workable rationale for playing within the rules of the established structure, flawed though it may be.
_____

I grew up in the same county as NC's capitol city, Raleigh. I was 30 minutes by car or three hours by school bus from the "magnet" schools in the inner-ring suburbs.

When I was in fourth grade, my parents decided to try enrolling me in a magnet school in Raleigh; teachers and administrators loved my test scores, and I performed at the time head and shoulders above the academic performance of others at my elementary school in my small town.

Here's what I found there:

*drug users, alcoholics, homeless people, and pedophiles walking through school property daily, with police on foot or in cars following them to keep us safe

*hyperaccelerated curricula based on "mental gymnastics" types of games rather than a thoughtfully constructed academic program ensuring that all the gaps in basic skills were filled in (they tried to teach us algebra in the fourth grade, one short year after we were working on memorizing the times tables--VERY few of us were cognitively ready)

*overworked teachers who didn't see students as people but instead saw them as numbers

*fellow students with significant emotional and psychological problems who should have been institutionalized but who instead were mainstreamed because they were superintelligent in limited directions

*fellow students with amazing egos because of the jobs their parents had or the money they made

*fellow students who were significantly more violent than anyone in my small town, including adults (fights happened frequently, and bullying was rampant; the administrators seemed to see us as experimental subjects and didn't really do much until a child put another in the hospital using only his bare hands)

*a boring and/or otherwise distasteful 30-minute (each way) commute (by car) with a compulsive liar (the son of a local town commissioner), a bunch of misbehaving hypocrites (the Catholic family whose children acted like brats and grew up to be drug abusers--but they went to the nice private Catholic school in downtown Raleigh near my own school), and a complete space cadet (a girl who perhaps said ten words to me in an entire year, and whose nose was even more often in a book than mine was)

*no ability to join ANY academic extracurricular clubs, athletic teams, or civic organizations

Sure, the current governor's daughter went there as well, but aside from the daily drama of seeing her driven to school in the gubernatorial limo (note: the excitement soon palled), there wasn't anything "extra" or "better." In current jargon, there was no "value added."

So I came back to my own elementary school for fifth grade with teachers I'd known all my life, fellow students I'd known since kindergarten, two cousins in my graduating class, parents only a five-minute drive away, and schools only six blocks away (yes, in all three directions: elementary, middle, and high school).

Yes, there were some bad things. My school was more conservative (for an entire year, no one spoke to the one transfer student who dressed like an MTV star, up to and including the 80s multicolored hair and cheap accessories). There was no funding for science and math (the last time I dissected an animal by myself, I was in seventh grade, and in my senior year, we had four people in my pre-calculus class). My fellow students were tracked by race and socioeconomic class instead of ability (some really smart people were kept out of the college-preparatory track because they didn't test well--which of course means they didn't answer standardized test questions well that presupposed a particular class- and race-based knowledge of the world). I was disciplined--paddled, in fact--in kindergarten when I got up and got a book to read instead of sleeping on my mat at naptime. Other students were intensely jealous of anyone who was smart, and some teachers thought some parents somehow were doing work for their smart children (even work in class--yes, it was illogical). There weren't any racial designations but "black" and "white"; the only "Asian" was a foreign exchange student, and Hispanics were completely unknown--as were Jews. And some parents wouldn't let their kids date interracially (they still hadn't gotten over the fact that the schools had integrated just a couple of years before we were born).

But I was able to play soccer, be in the marching, concert, jazz, and pep bands, be a member of the Junior Civitans, and participate in the local trivia competition (Quiz Bowl). A cousin played football AND marched in the halftime show every game; one year, he had an amazing trumpet solo. Another cousin ran track, played soccer, played football, played percussion in our jazz band, was a member of the Civitans and the Latin and Spanish clubs, and drove a school bus.

When your school has only 800 people and your graduating class only has 150 people, there are plenty of opportunities to be active.

And most of the teachers were VERY good ones. Sarcastic, sometimes, and perhaps not always the easiest to get along with--but VERY good. And they didn't put up with any bullshit.

No, I didn't have college-level classes offered to me in high school. But I also didn't see gang violence, have to walk through metal detectors each day, or have to deal with any drugs stronger than pot or alcohol.

And at my 20-year reunion, I knew everyone's name, and they knew me. In fact, if there had been a multi-year reunion and everyone attended from three years ahead of me to three years after me, I might've not known 10 people. This past Christmas, four consecutive graduating classes had a party at a big nightclub in Miami and then went for a collective cruise in the Bahamas; I guess that shows our sense of "togetherness."

I heard through the grapevine that that fellow-feeling disappeared when another 800-1000 nouveau riche children from North Raleigh (the land of suburban developments with names like "Chadwyck" and "Deer Chase") were enrolled in my high school a couple of years after I graduated.

Suddenly, no poor kids or students or color--or poor students of color--were featured in the local newspaper with any award of any type. Almost all of the faces were white, and all of the clothes were fashionable and expensive.

Suddenly, there was a swim team, and they met in Raleigh at a pool in an established, but now new-money, suburb.

Suddenly, a new gym and a new auditorium were built, as well as two more classroom buildings.

Suddenly, juniors and seniors had to pay serious money to park their cars, and there was a waiting list.

And suddenly, the school began to look like just another big Raleigh high school, with its stratified society and rigid academic tracks.

I'm glad the loss of that feeling of community happened after I graduated; I don't think I would have handled it well if my middle and high school years had been patterned after that one year at the [still-] crappy "magnet" school in Raleigh.

NCbear (who used a lot of space to say that the health and potential success of a community and the health and potential success of its schools are inextricably interlinked :smile:)
 
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faceking

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"The fact is, better neighborhoods typically have much more money for schools, and they typically have much better schools."

True, but again you are equating it to money. "Better neighborhoods" do raise more at school auctions, tax bases, etc... but they also have less single family households, stronger community support, professionals/educated whom eschew the same unto their offspring, work over welfare mentality may be more prevalent. A lot of that is intelligent and nutured wealth benefits, not just throwing money esp in the hands of non-competitive checkless/balanceless systems. Here on the West Coast, you see many SE Asian 4.x valedictorian children coming from poverty level homes. But I'm not saying it's all culture either.
 

faceking

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Algegra may not have changed, but what has changed in the past 30-40 years is this: Education budgets have been steadily slashed and/or failed to keep up with inflation, as a correlative of Republican sponsored tax cuts. Standardized testing has become the measure of 'success', focused mainly on basic math and English language proficiency, and to a lesser degree science. Meanwhile, such "non-essentials" like phys ed, athletics, after school programs, foreign languages, art, music, humanities in general, social sciences, and of particular note civics and history, have all been deemphasized, cut back, or eliminated altogether to balance the budgets. To my mind, unless an education is well-rounded, unless it's interdisciplinary and teaches you how to think, and to think critically, it's not really an education, it's basic training in basic drone proficiency. That's what the lack of funding and overemphasis on standardized testing in a few core subject areas has resulted in, and schools in poorer neighborhoods have typically felt much more of the pinch than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Such a heavy topic to cover, and I've seen so many data points going every which way but lose.... for example the spend per SAT score and how states fair... thusly where/how the money should be spent? Do states wind up spend extra for students that are dropping out anyways? I admit you can throw billions and fix pretty much anything, except some of the bottomless pits that exist in public education.

"it's not really an education, it's basic training in basic drone proficiency."

for the doomed dropouts, that'd be a win... dropouts are going through the rough because of cut backs to the number of new tubas being bought, or needed repairs to the student theatre being forgone.
 

andrexx

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Yikes. Jailed? I'm glad my state, Minnesota, has open enrollment - a kid can attend any school in any district (with a few obvious restrictions). It's certainly not perfect, but at least you won't get jailed for taking your kids out of a failing district.
 

cruztbone

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As a school board trustee of a school district in central CA, i am dismayed and shocked that this woman was sent to jail. this does not happen where i live, and it would NOT happen in our school district. She wants the best for her children and made a choice to place them in a school she saw as best meeting the needs of her kids. Jail should not be an option considered here.