I’ve spent a few years (more than five) teaching in “Title 1” schools with a majority-minority population (African-American) in an extremely high crime inner city environment. When I say high crime, this means that I have personally known a student who was murdered by his fellow gang members who were afraid he was talking to the police, dealt with overdoses in the classroom, had students who were arrested during the year for assault, battery, terroristic threatening, attempted murder and drug possession. I’ve had former students arrested for capital murder and one enterprising young fellow who, along with one of his gang buddies, engaged in a shoot out at a bodega where two participants emptied AR-15s and another emptied the mag of his Glock 17, all shooting at each other at close range, and only the guy with the Glock sustained a minor injury. Their ineptitude is often their salvation.
One of the things to understand about public schools is that butts in seats equals federal dollars in the bank. The more kids you show on your roll, the more money you receive. Those kids do NOT really have to be there in order to receive the money, you just have to have them on the roll.
One of the schools where I was teaching made the local news for having a 50% daily absentee rate. Each day, every day, every week, every month, at least half of our kids would be absent. Imagine trying to run any kind of organization with that level of absenteeism. Why were they absent? Well, it seems many of them may not have existed… Each day, all the teachers were required to take roll in every class period. Any student who had 10 consecutive days of “no shows” was to be dropped from our rolls. This never happened. Why? Because there would always be at least one teacher who did not take roll for a class, or “forgot” to mark that student absent. Administration would send out angry e-mails about our lack of diligence, and the refusal of certain teachers to take roll, yet they never did anything about it. Mind you, insubordination can get you fired in a hurry, even as a union school teacher, and taking roll is a basic part of the job. So why did administration do nothing? One suspects that these teachers were failing to mark students absent in collusion with administration, as this more or less doubled the official enrollment size of our school and thus doubled our federal funds.
At a classroom level, those of us teaching core courses required for graduation were given a set percentage of students we were allowed to assign “F” grades to; beyond that all students were required to receive passing grades. I found that I had to reserve my “F” grades solely and entirely for the no-shows, and even then it was a close call. As a result, if a kid at least showed up for school once a week and answered the roll, he was assured he would pass and eventually receive his diploma, and the school was assured federal money would keep rolling in. So these days, when you read about how many kids are missing from public schools after the Xi TB, remember that many of those children never existed to begin with.
Wombat mail…. https://theothermccain.com/2023/03/07/in-the-mailbox-03-06-23/
Dog whistle…. https://whoresandale.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/dog-days-freedom-is-just-another-word-3/
The last place you look…. https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/where-to-find-them/
Somebody might need that… https://sylg1.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/the-rule-is-a-joyride-must-exceed-five-miles/
SPLC terrorists… https://winteryknight.com/2023/03/07/southern-poverty-law-center-hate-group-is-again-linked-to-domestic-terrorism/
Did not see that coming… https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2023/03/07/the-ulcerative-colitis-post/
The truth is out there…. https://www.scifiwright.com/2023/03/january-sixth-half-truth-untruth-antitruth/
okrahead 