But don't you have to draw the line SOMEwhere?
Actually, I'm beginning to think that uniforms aren't a bad idea. I think the kids have too many distractions.
And, if that's not enough, I'd like to see inner-city kids be able to attend boarding schools out in the country. Does this liberal now sound reactionary or just radical?
A. The city I recently left, Long Beach, CA, introduced school uniforms and achieved notable improvements in conduct and academic performance.
B. We already know that leaving parenting to many inner-city families is a failure. My conservative friends can rant and rave all they want about "it's the parents' responsibility", but when the parents don't (and, to be honest, in many cases, can't) step up to the plate, they either society steps in or we lose another generation!
A charter school in DC has an approach:
KIPP SCHOOLSGive more instructional hours to students. One reason that KIPP DC schools are successful in improving achievement is that we provide 40 percent more time for learning than traditional public schools do. Our students are in school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday; and they attend summer school. You can't get different outputs unless you change the inputs, and our results show that more time on task is one of the key inputs.
In the first year, KIPP DC: AIM Academy fifth-graders jumped from the 16th to the 77th percentile in mathematics on the national Stanford 10 exam. While increasing classroom time might seem daunting in the face of ever-shrinking educational budgets, resources can be found. Other urban districts, including San Francisco and New York, are experimenting with longer school days and have found ways to fund these efforts
In those cases where the home environment is fully hostile to child rearing, then the state should step in! (Your "country boarding school" is my "state run orphanage".)
I would be interested to find how many single parents would allow their childen to go to a boarding school (parents to surrender their Child Welfare payments).
As a card-carrying fiscal conservative I see cost-effectivenes in tax-supported boarding school now as opposed to tax-supported prison later.
Of course Bill O'Reilly dismisses me as a "secular progressive' (one step away from "enemy of the state").
der Brucer
PS Common sense solutions often fail a liberal/conservative test.