Common Dreams has an important article on the new National Resolution for Ending School Pushout. Too many children - students from poor commmunities, students of color - face punitive, zero-tolerance school environments that dramatically increase the likelihood of students dropping out of school.
Robert C. Koehler writes in Common Dreams:
Our military, political and cultural thrust reaches every corner of the globe. We're the world's only superpower. And we're feeding our own children -- a shocking percentage of them, at any rate -- into a sort of Darwinian meat grinder of low expectations, zero tolerance and fend-for-yourself hopelessness.
This is our school system in much of Poverty America: an ill-funded, desperate and deteriorating bureaucracy of bad ideas and entrenched disrespect for everyone -- especially those who care. When I was an outside writing consultant, some years ago, at several high schools on the West Side of Chicago, I saw first-hand the us-vs.-them mentality that prevailed, as though the schools were colonial outposts in these low-income neighborhoods, run by an occupying army.
