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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (49810)	6/10/2004 8:40:25 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 794015

John, this is not a competition over who has more sympathy for kids being raised in bad conditions. It is not useful to make it into one. Nor, do I have the least interest in doing so. I'm simply showing you some evidence that conditions in schools in urban ghettoes are much worse than you seem to think. And offering you a book to take a look at. If you don't wish to do so, fine. I'm not trying to elicit sympathy; I'm arguing there are great inequities, structural ones, related to race that make life worse for all of us. That's what this is primarily about, the entrenched underclass and its culture and poverty. Ah, well, there you go. Put that label on it and we are back to a conflict of assumptions. You seem to think the poor are poor because of their culture; I think the poor are poor because of racial discrimination, because of the social class structure of American society, and, oh by the way, some cultural impediments. That latter is easily brushed aside when opportunity makes its appearance. Witness the wonderful work that the many innovative schools in the New York City public school system, run by teachers, are doing. Central Park East is only the most famous. How does assuring racial diversity at Stanford prepare those kids in the ghettos to function effectively in this world? Odd question. I presume you mean that ghetto kids can't hack it at Stanford. If so, take a look at the classic work on all this, the Bowen and Bok volume entitled The shape of the river : long-term consequences of considering race in college and university admissions . As for other meanings of your question, I can only guess. For black and hispanic kids, they learn how to function in an almost completely white managed society. For white kids (as you know, these categories are, in practice, a great deal more complicated than these level of conversation), the assumption is they learn how to live in an increasingly, so the saying goes, diverse world. Do you have a problem with those goals? As for what other things that could be done to address poverty and/or racial discrimination, a great deal could be done, but it isn't and won't, at least at the governmental level until the political tides turn. Josh Marshall's point about Kemp is the most telling illustration of this I've found.