School Segreagation: 2011 style

I was slightly shocked when I heard about this; that a school in PA has been experimenting with segregating black students from the rest of the school for about 20 minutes a day while also separating the girls from the boys in that race. Actually, I can say a lot of things in favor of this, and not because I've suddenly turned racist.

Ask people who've gone to all girls or all boys schools. They believe that they got a better education that way; that they were able to better learn without pressures of being around those of the opposite sex. The same would be true, I assume, for those of other races. But just as I don't think that I would have done as well without guys in my classes (I got all my motivation from wanting to squish guys under my foot as my grades surpassed them), I'm sure that there are those who would prefer to continue as they always have. But school psychologists have been trying to bring groups of support together for all of my school career. In 5th grade I was put into "Project Girl Power" where every week or so the girls would get together with our female counselor to talk about how girls can succeed in a world with a glass ceiling. In high school the most important club that you didn't choose to be in was/is the "Young Black Men's Club" (it had a better name, but as I'm a white woman, I didn't really pay that much attention). They would get together with their black counselors and talk about ways to get black men interested in education and out of gangs and jail. I knew a lot of guys who were in that club and I can tell you that they will go exceptionally far. So, we can agree with these segregationist clubs, but not with a segregationist classrooms? That makes no since.

There's a huge difference between segregation in the 50s and segregation today in schools. For one, there's no separate building. They're also not going to be handing the black students hand-me-down textbooks. There will not be new teachers, but rather the restructuring of the students into a specific schedule. There will not be, I assume, a separate lunch for the black students, nor would black students be forced into separated extra-curricular classes.

One last thing, just as a warning, not as a criticism: it should be voluntary. Many schools have a voluntary single-sex class available, the same should be true here. The problem with trying to stuff everyone into the "best teaching environment" mold is that there's about 20 different ways to learn and everyone excels in a different environment. Purposefully removing the black student with all white friends who is excelling would be incredibly unproductive in the least.

Why This Country Sucks

I'm going to start a new series here called "Why This Country Sucks". Pretty much, I'm just going to identify a problem with this country and give a credible solution. There's a whole lot of overlap (go figure) so it'll probably be a pointless and confusing series. But there's going to be one major theme, I know. That is, individual accountability goes a whole lot farther than what you do for yourself and your family and friends. Individual accountability must be an accountability for the entire country (and ultimately the world) if you ever want to expel the phrase "this country sucks" from your vocabulary.

Today's lecture: On schools; specifically on in-school-suspension--why it's great and why it's so hard to find.

Did you know that the typical punishment for a child that skips school is out of school suspension for the day? So you just rewarded the child with the outcome that they wanted in the first place—they get to skip school. A suspension counts as an unexcused absence, which at the schools I've been to, 10 equal failing the class. So, if a student gets caught skipping school for one day, plus the day they get sent home for punishment, that's 2 days absent. The major reason for this is because schools don’t have an in school suspension program in place, generally because when the funding fails the extra teacher who doesn’t actually teach but supervises the delinquent children is let go. With no extra hands there to watch them, the students are sent home. If the parents were to all volunteer for just an hour a day to sit in that classroom then no students would have to be sent home as a reward for skipping school. I believe that no crime committed by students should result in an out of school suspension, including fighting. If we send them home, then those student who don’t want to be in school will start fights to be sent home. And what’s to stop them? They aren’t going to get some revelation while sitting at home in front of the TV screen that an education is the key to their future. We have to make it so that if nothing else no one slips through the cracks in the education system by being absent due to suspensions.