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