And yet segregation in our school's is still alive and well in America. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/16/MNGL46MGP71.DTL
Why don't you move into Oakland and send your children to McClymonds High? Local schools merely reflect the demographics of their neighborhoods. Bussing wasn't the answer. In fact it's ethnocentric to believe that Whites are more capable of being good students than blacks. Why do folks complain about majority Black schools but rarely complain about majority White schools?
Lack of Correlation Between Salaries and Student Performance Average Percentile on 10th Grade STAR Test (1999) Average Percentile District Salaries Math Reading Four Year Drop-Out Rate Oakland *$52,196 30 19 22 percent Santa Clara $48,615 49 33 4 percent San Diego $47,223 46 35 14 percent Los Angeles $46,554 30 20 19 percent Elk Grove $45,813 41 33 17 percent Anderson High $43,652 50 34 13 percent Clovis $42,928 60 48 11 percent *Includes new salary raise. Salary cited is pay for a teacher with 10 years experience, which closely resembles the district average.
Pabst . . . Amador Valley High in the posh surroundings of Pleasanton ( can you say PeopleSoft? ) offers and fills 21 AP classes while Pittsburg High offers 9 and rarely fills them. Volunteers spend 250 hours per week in Walnut Acres Elementary School classrooms in Walnut Creek, while Sun Terrace Elementary of neighboring Concord averages only 42 hours per week of volunteer time. Many sports facilities at once proud Richmond High are dilapidated. The dirt track and dusty bleachers are empty. The tennis courts are chained and locked, and grass has pushed thru cracks in the courts. There is no track or tennis program at Richmond High, where 85% of the students are black or latino. Imagine that, no track team at a school that is practically all black and latino. Amazing! Richmond High also lacks swimming, water polo, lacrosse and golf teams, common at schools in more affluent areas. Richmond High received ZERO BOOSTER CLUB MONEY last year. Meanwhile, Acalanes High in Lafayette, with pristine facilities, drew $100,000 in sports donations alone. There is no doubt that disparities in Education follow racial and economic lines. That is today's reality. And it is sad. What happened to that "Education President" that we had a couple years ago? Is he still around? Oh, my bad. He's sending another $75 billion to Iraq to help put in post offices, zip codes, and a $1 billion dollar embassy!
What?!?!!?!?!!? No water polo team? That is unacceptable! Damn Bush. We he should immediately allocate our tax dollars to this poor school so these kids can play some golf, tennis and for God's sake, water polo too. Waggie, the Japanese and Europeans are kicking our ass in science and math. Do you really think water polo is the problem here? LMAO. Get a grip. We need higher test scores. For God' sake, how many times do I have to say this, we have too many damn young people working at malls and going into services jobs. We need to create a much stronger math and science curriculum and forget about the cracks on the tennis courts. This is a serious problem buddy and building a freaking swimming pool with our tax dollars is not going to help this country one Damn bit. Jeesh. No wonder this country is becoming soft. We can't do basic algebra but we like to swim.
It's all about discipline. We are becoming a Nation of "hamburger-flippers" because we have set the bar way too low at our schools. The poor math and science test scores that you speak of are sad, but very much true. I read recently that only about 6% of our college grads now graduate with engineering degrees, whereas Japan sees 60% of their grads with engineering degrees. I, as well as Joseph Schumpeter ( Father of the theory: "Creative Destruction" ) have no problem with today's outsourcing. Neither does Alan Greenspan for that matter. But whenever you hear Alan speak at Humphrey-Hawkins, he tries and tries to pound home the fact that we are losing our competitive "edge" in the world because our Educational System is falling apart. We need to raise the bar for our schools, with better teachers, more funding to get those accredited teachers and programs, better financial accountability for the taxpaying public, and an all-around emphasis on education in our communities. After-school sports programs are an ideal environment to create and foster those concepts of "discipline and competition". Kids love to compete if given the chance. They need to have that opportunity.
Well I believe that teachers need to have a competitive salary system and schools too. This means we that do not give schools more money, we simply allocate the funding to those that deserve it. In other words, schools that perform well, get more funding then those that don't. Teachers who have students that are making the grades, get more money. Now this may sound counterintuitive. We should be giving more money to the bad schools and paying bad teachers more right? Wrong. We need to hold schools and teachers accountable for their students. If you give schools and teachers an incentive to do better they will. This has been proven in every other field in this country from Wall Street to Main Street. Money is not the answer. It never is. Accountability is. As for sports, I agree, both sports and music programs in general stimulate learning and discipline in young people but I think schools have to fight for that funding. Funding should never be a foregone conclusion. Trust me Waggie, if they want it bad enough, they will get it. I don't believe in handouts. Waggie, if you ran a hedge fund and had 10 traders trading for you. Now five of them were performing well and making a lot of money and five of them were not taking the job seriously and performing terribly? If you got more capital in the fund, who would you want to allocate that capital to? The five good traders? Or the five bad traders? Answer that question and you will understand my point.
There aren't too many sports that I can think of that command one to be in the strongest physical shape that water polo does. Ever watch a college game or Olympic team play live? It's like wrestling, swimming, soccer, football, and basketball all rolled into one, albeit treading water the entire time. "Yugoslav Ratko Rudic had four Olympic gold medals to back up his grand plan as USA's Olympic Team coach. Tony Azevedo, the much heralded star from Stanford and the "Michael Jordan" of water polo wanted one of his own. So when Rudic suggested his U.S. national men's water polo players practically turn their lives over to the sport, Azevedo went along with the plan. What followed was eight hours of daily practice, and not of the drills and scrimmage variety. No, Rudic's plan called for lifting and swimming: 13,000 yards one day, 6,000-yard sets at maximum sprint the next." Yeah, it's just a sport for pussys. http://gostanford.collegesports.com/sports/m-wpolo/spec-rel/050704aaa.html
Like any good hedge fund or corporation, the success of that entity has a lot to do with the management team that is in place. If you are not able to recruit good teachers, and make sure that your school administrators are "top-notch" . . . nothing else will matter.