An email from Robert Bain deserves posting here and our concern:
“seeing the violence increasing within Shelby County; seeing the teachers in Shelby County who are unhappy with the new breed of children who are entering into the schools; and just seeing the parents in Shelby County who are fearful of the new breed of students.”
Words can be either friend or foe and within them one can lift-up or put-down. Given my penchant for children, for education, for language; I responded negatively to the use of breed in describing…. That I might be alone in that sensitivity, makes it hurt none the less.
That to the side, I’m still confused: what I read is that a Memphis based non-profit organization wants to create a charter school that would draw high school dropouts from Memphis. This proposed Second Chance Academy, we read, “would help at-risk kids who’ve dropped out of city schools and keep troubled children from enrolling in county schools.”
Further, the article indicates that this is a win-win situation for the suburban school district because it would not draw students or funding out of the system and it would be (brace yourself) “saving the county from being polluted by bad children” and “Shelby County would actually lose nothing pretty much.”
Continued reading of the article reminds us that a) Shelby County doesn’t want charter schools and, more importantly, b) charter schools are intended to address failing schools of which the county system has none. In other words, it seems that folks outside of Shelby County Schools are volunteering to take the bad breed out of Shelby County Schools with a backdoor charter school that the County is otherwise ineligible for.
This, to me, sounds not as much save the children as save the county from the city’s children that have or are moving into the county.
This may sound like an aside; but it is not intended to be so:
When MCS was looking at candidates for Superintendent, two candidates had a leg-up in my estimation in that they came from school systems that had many of the issues faced by Memphis (Richmond, Virginia and Miami, Florida). The candidate from Miami had an additional advantage as he worked in Miami under former New York City Schools Superintendent Rudy Crews.
In New York City, they have what are known as 600 schools — my step-father taught at Manhattan High School, a 600 school. These are schools that students are moved to when they cannot function in the normal school setting largely for discipline reasons. These are the students that keep the other students in the class from learning. Currently, MCS has a high school for drop-outs and I’ve read where Dr. Cash has made mention of what sounds like a 600 school system for Memphis whereby a student could be removed from a classroom/school where their behavior disrupts learning for the other students and put into a school that brings a different focus to the education process.
This has always sounded like a serve and save all our children concept. The article in today’s paper, on the other hand, sounds like serve and save our county. I could be wrong and it is only the use of the words breed and bad that has me thinking that someone thinks something else of themself than our children.
From what I can see about schools in MSC, schools that are meant to address the failing students become institutions that make things even worse by policy. No one wants to admit that. That’s why you don’t see any stats on them.
They are nothing but a shell game for federal funding and sandbagged statistics, fodder for a backslapping party, then a blamestorm.
Maybe someday, someone with the power to do something real, will care enough about kids, who receive absolutely no support to succeed, to address that simple core issue.
It isn’t that difficult, but, it’s become an institutionalized machine of protracted cruelty and depraved inhuman behavior here. Removing education and support for the masses to create this condition, evil which builds a machine to support itself.
This will fall, this will fail, the machine and all it’s participants will be destroyed in the process, by design, in the big picture, it’s a suicide machine.
Can you feel the self destruction, see it’s effects? It’s all happening now, to the last suicide machine.
Maybe cultivating a new crop of suckers is not a god idea after all.
Both sides are dead wrong.
We need to start seriously considering a universal voucher program in Memphis. A serious body of research suggests that, if properly designed and implemented, it could do wonders for our kids as well as strengthening the public school system. Take a look at it, Mayor!