THE DAILY BLADE: Nagin Has A Chocolate Chip On His Shoulder
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin believes that the slow recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is part of a plan to disperse black voters geographically to make it more difficult for blacks to be elected to political office.
"Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community," Nagin said in a speech to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers serving the black community.
The Washington Post reports that Nagin, who won reelection last May over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, "suggested that his assertion that New Orleans would once again be a majority-black [‘chocolate’] city had made him a political target" and that his reelection chances "seemed slim because ‘they dispersed all of our people across 44 states with one-way tickets.’"
What an ingrate! Cities around the country – notably throughout Texas – opened their hearts and coffers to Katrina evacuees (sometimes picking up the tab for rent and utilities) only to be rewarded by stratospheric spikes in crime as former denizens of New Orleans sought to recreate their violent, drug-fueled lifestyles in their new digs.
In Texas, relocation of Katrina evacuees had "a major impact on crime and the cost of policing in Texas," according to a study by Sam Houston State University's Police Research Center. For instance, six months after 175,000 Katrina evacuees relocated to Houston, that city reported 160 additional drug offenses, 48 property offenses, 121 petty offenses and 116 violent offenses – which increased law enforcement expenditures $4.7 million.
By now, cities with large numbers of Katrina evacuees would be more than happy to send them back to Mayor Nagin. But guess what? Despite his paranoid, race-baiting comments to the black newspaper editors and publishers gathered at the Capital Hilton, Nagin and other New Orleans officials have repeatedly made it clear they don’t want many of them back at all.
Those Who Can’t … Teach Anyway
Now that Congress is debating whether – and in what form – to renew No Child Left Behind, some legislators on both sides of the aisle are openly wondering whether it’s time to face the reality that some children will never catch up, no matter what.
When Congress passed NCLB in 2002, the breakthrough federal education program aimed to have every public school student – whether middle class or poor, white or minority, native born or illegal alien - performing at grade level in reading and math by 2014. Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA, recently told The Washington Post, "There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target."
A group of 57 Republican lawmakers have endorsed a bill that would essentially gut NCLB. The WaPo reports:
Under the House version, states could opt out of the law's mandates through a referendum or through a decision made by a combination of state officials. The Senate version would allow states to opt out of some requirements through negotiations with the federal government. Both versions would allow states to use nearly all their federal education funding, except money designated for special education, for any educational purpose.
One can make a credible case that it is senseless for NCLB to apply to special needs students or to non-English speaking illegal aliens (AKA "migrant children"), so the law was doomed to failure from the start. But The New York Times considers an additional factor that makes the educational goals of NCLB out of reach for millions of students, not just these hard cases: an acute lack of qualified teachers, particularly in the middle school grades.
Middle schools do not attract – and cannot retain – qualified, talented teachers, according to The New York Times:
[E]ducators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.
As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind. …
"More people end up in middle schools because that’s where the openings are," said Carmen Fariña, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system who is now helping 35 middle school principals reshape their schools. "It’s not necessarily a choice." …
[I]n the Bronx, [Jason] Levy, the principal of I.S. 339, has worked hard to cobble together a staff capable of helping him revive a school mired in years of failure.
"Just go to a job fair," he said. "The lines for elementary school and high school are around the corner. We can’t get people to teach in middle schools."
One of his solutions has been to rely heavily on Teach for America. Twenty-one of his teachers, nearly a third, are part of the program, which recruits recent college graduates. While such teachers are often well-educated and energetic, many leave after their two-year commitments.
Why are these teaching jobs going begging? Because compared to middle school, teaching high school is a cakewalk – those students most in need of a dedicated, talented, innovative educator to inspire them to learn have dropped out already, the paper explains:
"Problematic kids in high school don’t come to school anymore, but in middle school they still show up," said Barry M. Fein, the principal of Seth Low. "I think that piece alone makes it more challenging."
The challenges surface in test scores. … The most recent results of math and reading tests given to students in all 50 states showed that between 1999 and 2004, elementary school students made solid gains in reading and math, while middle school students made smaller gains in math and stagnated in reading.
So there you have it: Tenured, unionized teachers who can’t – and don’t want to – make sure no child is left behind (second item, The Daily Blade, February 23, 2007). Whodathunkit?
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