[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by MaggieL
Oh, come on, syc. The *kids* aren't being sold. What a silly piece of rabblerousing that idea is. The concession to make money from trying to teach them is being sold...the government having failed miserably at the task. Again I direct people's attention to The writings of Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian for some talk about what's wrong with schools and schooling.

You can call it rabblerousing...I call it a fair and legitimate concern. From a parent and student perspective, their city is selling their educational rights to Edison, a "for-profit" company. From that perspective, it would seem that the city is trying to "cash in" on their students. I am well aware that the city is essentially hiring someone to run the "system." But what is the primary focus of the system? Educating children. The children don't have an option. The parents don't really have options either (move outside the city, try to get their child into a charter school, or pay for private school). So, you have the City of Philadelphia (and the Commonwealth) giving a company (most likely Edison) x amount of dollars to control the education of 200,000 kids. In a way, yes, the kids *are* being sold.

I can assure you that it has *not* always been like that...it drastically deteriorated over the time that I was in the system, and not uniformly. During my childhood the worst bit of disorder there ever was was timed paintpan droppings to annoy a substitute teacher. By the time I got to high school, there were known "good schools" and "bad schools". While I was in high school (a "bad school) we had three shootings and one bomb...not a bomb *threat*, but an actual bomb. This was in 1969.

I'll concede that the discipline factor has deteriorated. At the same time, "the proper way" to discipline children has dramatically changed. You give your child an ass-whipping now, and you're likely to receive a visit from your local child protection agency. The time in which you went to school was also a dramatic time of social change in this country.

At the same time, there are other factors that can be attributed to the degradation of discipline, both inside and outside the home.

We now have a society where the only constraint on the behavior of a significant cohort within the public school student population is the legal system: if it won't get you busted, go right ahead. And even if you *do* get arrested, it's only a juvie offense.

This is not necessarily true anymore. More and more teenagers are being charged as adults, beyond just murder.

Don't tell me it's a matter of money; that's bullshit. No amount of money in the school district budget will fix what's *culturally* wrong with the kids in Philly schools today.

Granted, it is more than a money problem, but money IS a huge part of it. I never specifically said it was all about money...it's about overall improvement in the end. Furthermore, you really can't compare Upper Merion and Philadelphia...they're two different worlds.