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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (78548)	11/2/2003 12:22:43 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Here's another piece--same subject. Message 19457110

To: Rambi who wrote (78548)	11/2/2003 6:49:46 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 82486

No excuses is nice- but I'm not sure how you change the parents of some of these kids. We've got a shot with the children, but they are going to take more time and resources to educate (and this more money), when they have uneducated parents producing them. A child in a print rich environment- like that of the "normal" professional household- will be hearing thousands more words a month than the child in a print impoverished home. I'm not sure we can make that up completely, but we can try, by giving the impoverished child better teachers (as opposed to giving them the least qualified teachers- which we are currently doing). One of the great financial drains on inner city schools is crumbling infrastructure. The schools in the inner cities are frequently older, and take much more money to maintain than comparable suburban schools. That money, that inner city schools use for band aid patches to their crumbling buildings, comes at the expense of student equipment. I would love to see the cycle of ignorance broken, but to do that, we'd need a real commitment to education- and not a faux one. I say we should call the war on drugs a loss, declare defeat, and put all that money into upgrading American schools, and getting super qualified teachers in them. It won't be done, of course, but it could be, and it should be.

To: Rambi who wrote (78548)	11/3/2003 6:50:42 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 82486

A trend, apparently. Old-school pop cashing in on adult audience Streisand, Midler and several other entertainers past the age of 40 - including some well past - are agelessly thriving on album-sales charts By Jim Farber NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Call it elder power. Right now, 25 percent of Billboard's Top 40 albums were either recorded by stars past the age of 40 or are enjoyed by listeners in that seasoned range. Barbra Streisand, 61, just sold more than 160,000 copies of "The Movie Album," double the opening-week sales of her previous CD. Bette Midler, 57, saw her latest work ("The Rosemary Clooney Songbook") start way up at No. 14. Two weeks later, the CD holds in the Top 25. Both singers accomplished this while recording music that's between 40 and 70 years old. Meanwhile, Elvis Presley, Simon & Garfunkel, Seal, Michael McDonald and a Rat Pack collection also thrive in the Top 40, as do younger artists like Clay Aiken, Dido and Norah Jones, who each boast a huge ratio of graying followers. Rod Stewart's second collection of American standards hits has just hit the charts. The 58-year-old Stewart's previous album of songs by the swell set resurrected his career and sold 1.6 million copies. "In a year that's not great for sales, one silver lining is that music appealing to adults is doing quite well," says Billboard chart maven Fred Goodman. Record companies have tapped into this audience by hawking their wares over older-skewing TV outlets and by reaching an underserved audience of conservative listeners in mid-America. The day her album hit stores, Streisand deigned to leave the Malibu Colony long enough to offer her first live performance on TV in 40 years, on "Oprah." On her release day, Midler presented her first joint performance in 30 years with her original producer, Barry Manilow, on the "Today Show." Midler's record company has also been selling her album via 800-number TV spots primed to reach the couch-potato set too doughy to make their way into record stores. Michael McDonald's "The Motown Collection," on which the 51-year-old entertainer covers the catalogue of that classic label, benefited from having his "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in an MCI ad. Much has been made of the fact that older listeners don't know from downloading, so they buy the whole CD, thus upping their impact on the charts. It also helps that adult pop radio stations are bigger than ever. The Streisand, Midler, Stewart and McDonald albums also represent a trend-ette within the trend: They've benefited not just from being cut by aging stars, but also by collecting songs proven by time.