School systems cannot be expected to fix the problems of society. The kids are in school for 1/3 of a day for 1/2 of the year, this leave 5/6 of the time for them to be influenced by their parents and society. Urban school districts pay poorly, are under-equipped and have a hard time attracting qualified teachers. The starting pay in NYC is in the mid 30’s, in many parts of the country it is in the 20K range. NYC has just started offering a housing bonus to teachers who agree to move to the city to teach. In other words the salary is too low to live on unless one wants to commute from distant suburbs.

Are there bad teachers and administrators? Of course. Is this the root of the problem? No.

Just last week, his principal sent a “send-to-all” email about an “email virus” that was like living in a weird 1997 life rerun, except that he is sending them to us “for our protection…” Eeek!

My broadband is about $50 a month. (I don’t have cable TV, just broadband). Even though I make a good income and don’t have any dependents, that amount is a stretch for me because of high housing and commuting costs. I have often considered shutting it off and just picking up wireless because I can usually get a signal wherever I am.

I can’t imagine paying that much if I made half as much as I do and had children, as many people do.

It apparently makes those in the first group feel better to blame the victims and to deny the reality of the “two Americas” that John Edwards likes to point out. If you believe that it is the unions and the administrators that are the problem with poor school districts you are deluded.

Resentment against those who have managed to bargain for a decent standard of living is a common feeling. Instead of complaining against those who are making a decent living examine why so many other are not. Even white collar middle managers now live in fear of their jobs and health and retirement benefits.

As to inner city people having access to cable TV (and I guess this means internet access as well) you really don’t get what the lives of the poor are really like. Becoming informed would spoil your simplistic world view so I won’t bother suggesting spending some time learning the facts. Prejudice is just so much easier that having to deal with the complicated issues of the real world.

The truly underreported scandal in America is not “how underfunded the schools in urban districts are” because that doesn’t happen to be true. Per-pupil expenditures nearly everywhere have tripled, even allowing for inflation, over the past generation. The actual scandal is the explosion in unionized, unfireable, unaccountable non-teaching staff positions in major urban school disctricts. Public education is supposedly about educating children. In actual fact, it has increasingly become about employing adults in what often amount to patronage jobs for the Democratic faithful.

The poor-vs-rich districts thing is a red herring as well. Perhaps statewide leveling of funding is a “non-starter” in Feinman’s neighborhood, but we have had it for years here in California. Guess what? The schools are still an ill-maintained, ill-supplied dysfunctional mess. This is because funding is not the problem. The problem is the hijacking of the public schools as a cash cow by the public employee unions and their legions of Democratic enablers in state legislatures.

Cash is not the problem. Corruption and incompetence are the problems.

“…students snapped photographs using their mobile phones and combined them with radio reports, which they recorded using an iPod or a traditional microphone. The result was a series of multi-media news reports available to download from the internet.”

Some of these kids will no doubt become journalists in less than ten years, probably as early as five years. I wonder what kind of media they’ll be working for then.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6215532.stm

It’s probably past time to put all U.S. textbooks online and just charge a subscription fee per pupil. That would be a huge disservice to all the kids whose families cannot afford a computer and Internet at home, of course. So what is the solution?

One thing is for sure, the textbooks are very expensive. I think the schools could probably buy the kids $600 laptops in place of the five or six textbboks they have to haul around.

Also talk to the administrators and teachers about the availability of recent text books, supplies for the classroom and other matters of a similar nature. The unreported scandal in this country is how underfunded the schools in urban districts are. NJ is in the midst of a continual battle over equitable school funding and it seems no matter what the courts rule the legislature finds a way not to comply.

Here in NY per capita student costs in a wealthy neighborhood on Long Island can be $16-18,000 per year while poor districts in the state get $8000. This problem never gets solved because school budgets are funded from local real estate taxes and wealthy districts don’t want to see their taxes diverted elsewhere. Going to a state-wide funding scheme would mean the rich schools would get less and thus is a non-starter.

I only subscribe to my local Sunday’s edition. That’s because I don’t have time to read print Monday-Saturday. Too busy with work, family, etc. I visit the paper’s site every day to scan the news — local and regional news. Not the national stuff. But, on Sundays, I want to sit down with my paper. Not my computer.

That’s how the majority of people — not us ‘netizens — want the newspaper.

It’s easy to get myopic about the field(s) we practice in (i.e., online). But, we have to keep the mass market in perspective.
Mike

The biggest reason we still print the school newspaper (college level) is those print skills are still being demanded by those doing the hiring. Sure, that’ll go away eventually but until it does, I have to give students both print and online skills, because while online is the future, print is still the present. And the only way to give them the practical layout, design, etc. skill is to print a paper.