It sounds like you're dead seat on excusing parents who are total screw ups. You haven't said anything concrete other than its schools responsibility and we have to do something. Do you have any suggestions based on facts? Do you think simply chucking money at Highland is going to do anything?
Let's be clear: You're the one offering no solution. By placing the blame on the parents, you're abdicating society's responsibility to improve the education for children.
Bad parents exist because they're uneducated, haven't had successful behavior patterns modeled for them, and are generally overwhelmed by the same stressful environment as their children. How often have you awoken to gun shots? To people screaming outside at 5 AM? To neighbors beating their spouses? To find out that someone you know is dead, or in prison for 30 years? How many prostitutes do you walk by on your way to work today? How much stress are you under because you have no technological skills and your learned speech patterns make you unfit for even call center jobs? Most of these parents have never seen flash cards (when I first met her, my niece's mother didn't know where Austin was, didn't know who the Beatles are). It is absolutely 100% impossible for them to do what you're asking. But society does have the ability to move children into better schools, to create smaller classrooms, to pay more for better teachers and better facilities, and to pay for the research that will help us to better understand exactly what a better teacher and better school really is.
Another personal anecdote: Last night, my niece told my wife and I that she sees pimps and prostitutes all the time. It's just a normal, daily thing. She's seen worse than pimps and prostitutes, I know she has, but it still fucked with my head pretty badly. She can't go outside and play. Most of her friends' parents are drug addicts, violent, and stupid, so she can't (god I hope she can't) go over to their houses. She sees my apartment complex, full of new cars, luxury cars, people walking their dogs, families playing at all times of the day, and it's like a different world for her. At least she gets to see first hand what a moderate amount of success can do. Most kids around her don't even know that experience. And when they have kids, they won't have shit to model for them. They'll bit shitty parents from a shitty neighborhood, just like their parents and grandparents were. There's no magic in this. People don't just magically become good parents.
If you think people can magically overcome everything life throws at them, you're willfully ignorant. We're not masters of our own behavior. We're creatures of habit, of learned behavior. Stress, particularly financial stress, makes us markedly less intelligent and less able to modify even small things in our daily lives. There are a number of studies that show this.
As to people not offering solutions, most probably think the obvious solutions don't even need to be spoken aloud. Better pay for better teachers, better schools built in the district, more funding for after school activities, more funding for preschools. I also support getting rid of terrible schools like this one, bussing kids into better schools (as loaded as that topic is), and fighting teacher's unions on charter schools. I'd even support a heavily regulated voucher system that forbade religious instruction, required certain standards be met, and required schools to bring in students from all backgrounds, all neighbors, all income levels, and all history. At the end of the day, I mostly just want kids to have the ability to get out of these fucked up schools. Ideally I'd like to see universities fund new, highly exclusive educational programs that promised prospective students guaranteed high pay out of college if they work X years, where new research into the psychology and methodology of teaching could be employed. The economics of pay and the work pool require that you can't just increase pay or just increase standards. You have to do both in one creative way, and new educational programs (and not just shitty education masters programs) seem like they could be a part of the answer. I have more thoughts about this.
Hell, even Kosmo alluded to a possible solution by supporting a 7am-7pm charter school. KOSMO!!! And you say we're the ones who aren't proposing anything? I don't think you care as much as you think you do. I think you're annoyed that people put the onus on society for such things. And for that, you're part of the problem.
It's not just the schools. These kids are growing up in crushing poverty. In an environment where drug dealers are common and are controlling large neighborhoods. These kids see hookers every day. They know the gangs out there. They don't have HOPE. They don't believe they're going to be anything more than they are right now and if they DO think that at some point there is at least 12 years of "education" to get that notion out of your head. Years of knowing that your best chance of making something of yourself is getting the hell out of the neighborhood. At some point you learn how to survive and you have to do what you have to do.
Imagine growing up in an environment where many girls in your freshman class are pregnant. Where the majority of your senior class IS pregnant or already has kids. Imagine growing up knowing if you don't get out of there your BEST hope is maybe working as a mechanic's helper in a garage. Or at a grocery store. Or at a gas station. Not as some temporary job, but as a career.
Imagine being poor enough you rely on food stamps and you're STILL being shaken down by the local drug dealer for protection money. Imagine walking down the street to your school and you don't know if you're going to get knifed, shot, beaten, raped, sold into prostitution, etc. Maybe you'll date, and maybe you'll find someone not on drugs that you can build some kind of life with somehow... but maybe they'll be tuned out of the crushing suffocating world they live in because they just can't take it anymore.
Because no matter what, they know and they BELIEVE that their life is exactly what it will always be.
That is the real problem and THAT is what is being fought against.
This is a great post. I disagree with you about where the federal government fits into it all, but it's nice to see this from a libertarian.
