Political Roundtable - Part VI

[nate33]

Obama pardoning millions of illegals is not going to help the black's current situation at all.
It's only going to make things worse.

This is absolutely true.

[DCZards]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

[nate33]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

Baltimore has the second highest per pupil spending in the nation. Clearly, money isn't the issue.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-0 ... -districts

[dckingsfan]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

Baltimore has the second highest per pupil spending in the nation. Clearly, money isn't the issue.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-0 ... -districts

Yep, I have moved toward a voucher system - I no longer think there is enough money to fix the public schools in Baltimore (and other cities). It is interesting that the poorest families that have benefitted from alternative education are being battled by the teachers unions and the Ds. Fascinating politics if nothing else.

[FreeBalling]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

DCZards, I can assure you in Virginia there is $8,200 dollars a year for school. That's $32,800 for four years of school, the Pell grant is FREE MONEY from the State and Federal Government. There are also deferred student loan programs to offset any remaining balances. Students can use part of the Pell Grant to buy computer equipment, books and academic supplies.

On campus settings offer dynamic social experiences, while online colleges offer flexibility for those who want to work during the day. Tutoring is available for free in both settings. Just like anything else in life there is some due diligence required for selecting the proper institution.

Theses options are there for young and old scholars wanting to increase their self worth. There is a reason why only 32% of America has a four year degree. It's called dedication and it shows commitment to employers that the person can start and finish a task. I understand not everyone has the aptitude to become a Doctor. However, there are guidance counselors to help students make difficult decisions while in school. Pell Grants can also be extended to six years if needed.

There are also programs to help people finish High School and obtain their GED.

However,

If the person has lots of issues with the law or drugs their options go way down. People make choices in life, some are good and some are bad. We are defined by the choices we make in life.

I'd like to see some programs in the communities that focus on preserving core family values. Like having both parents.

[dobrojim]

All the money in the world for education will not overcome what students see as
the obvious truth, finding a job that has long term serious potential to support
a family and generate wealth is exceedingly difficult. Investment in human
capital on the part of private enterprise has become a rarity. The sad thing is,
those companies that do embrace that philosophy usually win out in the long run.

[dckingsfan]

All the money in the world for education will not overcome what students see as
the obvious truth, finding a job that has long term serious potential to support
a family and generate wealth is exceedingly difficult. Investment in human
capital on the part of private enterprise has become a rarity. The sad thing is,
those companies that do embrace that philosophy usually win out in the long run.

Hey dobrojim, a few questions - hope it doesn't come out like the inquisition

Just curious as to why you think private enterprise doesn't invest in their employees?

Also, why and if private enterprise has a moral obligation to invest in the development of an individual?

What is the definition of long-term and why do jobs need to be long-term?

[Chocolate City Jordanaire]

I believe it's all about money. It's so much easier to do well when your parents did well.
It's so much harder to do well when your parents did not do well. So many virtuous as well
as vicious cycles. And there is a ton of institutional racism that has nothing to do with white
people consciously plotting in their own minds or with other white people, about how they
can keep 'the other' down. There is a great dearth of empathy in terms of understanding
the full life experiences of other people, especially those of a different race. African
Americans are still clawing to catch up from starting 250 years behind white Americans
in the struggle to be economically successful.

I agree, totally, jim.

Money is the problem now. Not racism. Hell, I think most whites show blacks all kinds of respect. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Sports icons, actors, a President, a neurosurgeon turned politician....it's not like African Americans have no voice.

The folks with no money are the ones not empowered. Only when an affluent dark person drives in the "wrong neighborhood" (where few blacks live and much profiling exists) is it about race.

Even then it's generally a cop with little money targeting someone with money who he perceives must have stolen the car or been involved in narcotics distribution. That's a money/jealousy thing as much as a race thing.

Most systematic problems boil down to money IMO.

CCJ dead on. Back when I had an expensive car I got pulled over all the time. Once a cop even threw the license into my face with force. Kept my head down and carried on.

It was a jealous light skinned Cuban guy.

Wasn't George Zimmerman, the guy who shot an unarmed 17yr old black kid (who had just bought Skittles and iced tea in his relative's swanky community), a Hispanic?

In that case, the money aspect is he patrolled for the Neighborhood Watch, which essentially profiles dark people in the neighborhood. Okay, grungy-looking, no-money-having is associated with dark as well as people who don't belong.

Zimmerman IMO is a lot like the old man who claims he mistook his gun for a taser. Neither should have had live rounds and a loaded weapon. Too bad there was no Sheriff Andy Taylor to make sure either modern-day Barney Fife couldn't kill someone.

[nate33]

All the money in the world for education will not overcome what students see as
the obvious truth, finding a job that has long term serious potential to support
a family and generate wealth is exceedingly difficult. Investment in human
capital on the part of private enterprise has become a rarity. The sad thing is,
those companies that do embrace that philosophy usually win out in the long run.

Do you have any data for this? First of all, by what metric is private enterprise investing less in employees than in years past? Second, explain why companies devoted to maximizing their long terms success wouldn't "invest in their human capital" if what you are saying is true. Are you saying that the majority of corporations are willfully ignoring an obvious profit opportunity?

[Zonkerbl]

I've lived by the mantra "desperation is the best motivation" for decades. It drives you to succeed and take major risks. It made me leave NYC as a teenager to an empty studio in DC where there was a booming tech scene.

People with any talent should move from Baltimore, but that's been the mantra for decades now. You can't save a violent/dying former industrial city with no income opportunities or skilled labor. It's Detroit all over again. It's one of a handful of "Blue collar cities" that never evolved. This is an issue of the death of manufacturing in Baltimore/Detroit/Trenton/Upstate NY not the "plight of African Americans".

Migrate to survive, it's in all of our DNA....or none of us would hold blue passports.

Man I hate to agree with you but Dayton's the same way. RCA went to Mexico in the eighties, the air force kinda downgraded Wright Pat and boom. Dead city.

I think you should love and care for dying cities like you should love and care for aging parents. Make their passing as comfortable as possible.

New Orleans too. Man.

Well, I'm hoping what will happen is the internet will become so powerful that telecommuting will really take off. Then people who like to live in urban centers but want it on the cheap can buy a place in Detroit. Heck, Detroit will pay YOU to buy property there. Place is so empty there isn't even any crime anymore. Balti if you have family in the DMV. New Orleans if you like to party.

Dayton if you like... corn. Or Jesuits.

Zonker, I was at Wright Patterson back in the early 90s.

Speaking of corn, the first time I arrived at Scott AFB I noticed the cornfield. No way did I want to be stationed there....Of course that's what happened. I had orders to PCS to Andrews and a colonel who wanted me at Scott changed them. This after I was on an overseas remote for one year.

As fate would have it after I got to Scott this colonel liked my ex-wife more than me.

Ah, good times...

(I am way over that. Had totally forgotten, but corn reminded me.)

Oops, that should be NCR (national cash register). RCA was the factory that got shut down in Bloomington IN while I was there.

[Zonkerbl]

Especially this quote: "Public education has traditionally been the great equalizer in America. The tragedy today is that the decline of public schools is one of the leading contributors to generational cycles of poverty."

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

Baltimore has the second highest per pupil spending in the nation. Clearly, money isn't the issue.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-0 ... -districts

DC also has very high per capita spending per pupil, if memory serves.

Yeah, it's not money. It's about parenting. Throwing kids' parents in jail for non-violent crime is a sure-fire way to make sure the kids fail at school and life. It has to stop.

[Zonkerbl]

HOW?

Every since slavery most black men haven't been able to raise their families. Bill Cosby played Heathcliff Huxtable. Not many dads like him exist.

I had a great dad (definitely not a perfect dad). Military officer who nurtured from when he was in his 50s until he died at age 84. Before that he provided and stayed married to my mom for over 25 years. I literally saw him redirect a white man who yelled at me and my mom. He did so without gunplay or violence, despite having been a combat veteran with two tours in Vietnam.

If not for his example and my mom's constant prayers I would be putting the I in ignorant.

nate, slavery destabilized black families and stigmatized black men, particularly.

My thought about the "hero mom" who beat her son was "Where is his dad?"

Nate33, I wish you could be a big black man for a week.

CCJ, I hope you keep challenging me on my arguments. I appreciate our back and forth on these issues.

While there can be no doubt that slavery destabilized black families, it is my understanding that black families had largely recovered within the next 75 years.

According to Thomas Sowell:

• In 1950, 72 percent of all black men and 81 percent of black women had been married.
• Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates were higher than those of whites.
• Prior to the 1960’s the unemployment rate for black 16 and 17-year olds was under 10 percent.
• Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining, and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income.
• In 1965, 76.4 percent of black children were born to married women.

So in the 50's and into the 60's, the black family was doing pretty well by many measures. But since then, this is what happened:

Illegitmacy Rates

So this is why slavery matters Nate.

In the sixties the Black Power movement scared the bejeesus out of the US government, who viewed the movement as a legitimate threat. They were scared mostly because they were a bunch of racists who grew up to be racist because of decades of racist culture that is a direct consequence of the history of slavery in this country.

As a consequence, in the early seventies the CIA deliberately brought heroin from Vietnam into Harlem and other hotbeds of Black Power and deliberately addicted as many black people as they could, with the deliberate intention of destroying the Black Power movement. As a kind of lucky side effect they managed to destroy pretty much the entire black community for several decades.

Congratulations guys! Good job!

Then in the eighties more angry white people invented the practice of institutionalized racism by inventing the blatantly racist "War on Drugs," blaming black and other poor people for the atrocities they themselves had visited on them in the seventies!

[Zonkerbl]

Kill Whitey.

No, seriously. Enough is enough already. Destroy racism.

[dckingsfan]

...which goes back to the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago when I said we need to make sure there is good prenatal care for poor mothers, access to early childhood education programs, school-based wraparound services that address the social and mental needs of students, and well-paid teachers who have access to quality professional development.

All of these things, and more, are needed if we're serious about improving the educational outcomes of poor and low-income students.

Baltimore has the second highest per pupil spending in the nation. Clearly, money isn't the issue.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-0 ... -districts

DC also has very high per capita spending per pupil, if memory serves.

Yeah, it's not money. It's about parenting. Throwing kids' parents in jail for non-violent crime is a sure-fire way to make sure the kids fail at school and life. It has to stop.

Hey Zonk - I think it is as much about school choice and getting the parents involved. I work with a lot of the parents that go to DC schools - they would quickly pick a school that was better suited to their child. As much as the Rs are in the pockets of the Police union, the Ds are in the pockets of the Teachers union - that has to stop as well.

[Zonkerbl]

http://content.time.com/time/nation/art ... 05,00.html

"The start of the tenure movement paralleled similar labor struggles during the late 19th century. Just as steel and auto workers fought against unsafe working conditions and unlivable wages, teachers too demanded protection from parents and administrators who would try to dictate lesson plans or exclude controversial materials like Huck Finn from reading lists. In 1887, nearly 10,000 teachers from across the country met in Chicago for the first-ever conference of the National Educator's Association, now one of the country's most powerful teachers' unions. The topic of "teacher's tenure" led the agenda. By the turn of the century, tenure had become a hot-button issue that some politicians preferred to avoid. In 1900, the Democratic Party of New York blasted their rivals in the Times for taking up the issue, writing, "We deprecate the tendency manifested by the Republican party of dragging the public school system of the State into politics.""

Did I miss something? Have we solved the problem of parents and administrators trying to ban unpopular books and teach creationism in the classroom?

Not snarky, genuinely curious, since that appears to be why we have tenure for school teachers in the first place.

[dckingsfan]

Great point Zonk. In the case of the auto and steel industry - unions became very strong, I would argue too strong. And wages and more importantly rules on how management could run their companies became onerous. Worldwide competition took care of that...

In the case of teachers unions, they have moved past tenure into locking the K12 education establishment into stasis.

If you separate the two items, teachers tenure and content you have a better shot. For example, most charter schools don't teach creationism but also don't have a teachers union that keeps them from innovating.

So yes, we have moved past the "why we need tenure for teachers issue" and to how to create competition in the K12 educational establishment.

And yes, the "war on crime" and the "protect the teachers movements" are both to blame for our losing strategy on the war on poverty.

[TheSecretWeapon]

The notion that outcomes for people are simply a matter of the choices they make is simplistic and ignores the reality that not everyone has the same access to certain choices. Getting a job might be a great "choice," except for employment discrimination. A recently published study (which link I can't find today) showed that for identical candidates in all aspects except race, whites with a criminal record had the same chances of being hired as blacks without a criminal record.

Another employment study by Young Invincibles showed that black males needed two additional levels of education to match white employment levels. In other words, blacks with "some college" had about the same employment prospects as whites without a high school diploma. Blacks with an associates degree had about the same employment prospects as whites with only a high school diploma. Blacks with a bachelors had about the same employment prospects as whites with some college. The good news from this report is that the employment gap narrows as education levels increase. Blacks with a professional degree are almost as likely to be employed as whites with a professional degree.

Choices may seem pretty obvious to those of us who are educated, grew up in affluent homes, etc., but not everyone is even presented with the same options. My daughter has been working in Philly schools the past couple years. She's had teachers complain about having to "waste time" on the black kids the teacher just KNOWS will never amount to anything. She's had teachers tell her "these kids" are incapable of learning. Meanwhile, last year, she helped a sixth grader -- who'd been ignored and even harassed by teachers (the boy had teachers tell him he was stupid and that he'd end up in jail as soon as he turned 18) go from functionally illiterate to a 7th grade reading level in the span of a school year.

In the criminal justice system, for similar crimes blacks (and Hispanics) are more likely than whites to be sentenced to incarceration. Blacks in the federal system receive sentences that are 10% long than whites. About half that difference has been attributed to prosecutorial discretion -- what charges the prosecutor chooses to bring against a defendant. In addition, federal prosecutors were found to be twice as likely to file charges carrying a mandatory sentence against blacks. And, blacks and Hispanics were also found to be less likely to be diverted from incarceration as punishment for a crime.

Relief from a mandatory sentence is granted least often to black offenders, although blacks were the most likely to serve a mandatory sentence as compared to any other group of federal offenders.

Racial bias shows up in death penalty sentences as well. Minorities represent 55% of death row convictions. The likelihood of receiving a death penalty is significantly higher when the victim is white.

Various research indicates that blacks and whites experience significantly different treatment from police -- from the frequency of being stopped, to the kind of language police use, to the use of force.

I don't have time for much more at the moment. I appreciate the perspectives folks are offering here, and I'm posting the above for consideration in your thinking on racial issues. My view is that racism isn't everything, but that it permeates nearly everything. I think that history suggests that we'd be wise to listen to what minorities are saying about how they're being treated.

[dckingsfan]

Nice post...

[Zonkerbl]

I mean I work in the government and have seen first hand just how difficult it is to fire someone for incompetence.

I do recall one incident where a guy we had been trying to get rid of for years said something racist. He was out in the street in a month.

The trend has been to contract out work that isn't politically sensitive, like IT. There's no such thing as a politically controversial IT choice. I don't know if you can apply similar reasoning to teachers though. Maybe PE teachers could be contracted out. It seems they are though - they get fired all the time.

[dckingsfan]

Hey Zonk, isn't the best way to go to let the current school systems do what they do but then also let parents choose if they want to go to their public school or to the local Charter School? Wouldn't that be the best way to foster competition?

I would think that the local schools would improve quickly if they knew that they had competition.

I also think that charter schools have a better chance of not being racist - but I have no metrics to back this up.