This is a pretty tough way to get a school system to work It is also sad.

[tannybogus]

A Teachable Moment

When Tony Petite enrolled in elementary school in Denver in the fall of 2005, he quickly discovered that he was the only kid in fourth grade who didn’t know how to write in cursive. In the four years he spent in the New Orleans public school system, no one ever taught him how. “In my third-grade school,” he told me recently, “they just sit you in the class, and they just tell you to do this, and tell you to do that. In Denver, they help you, and they show you how to do your work.”

Tony arrived in Denver along with his parents and younger brother, Troy, as part of the epic exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of public-school students, driven from their homes in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and scattered to every corner of the country. At first, Tony felt out of place — he and Troy were among the only black students in the school — and academically, he started off well behind most of his classmates. But he got a lot of special attention from his teacher, and when he and his family returned to New Orleans a year later and he started fifth grade in Jefferson Parish, just west of the city, he was an above-average student.

Over the next two years, though, things slipped. His grades fell from A’s and B’s to C’s, D’s and F’s, and last semester, he was suspended five times, mostly for fighting. When the school year ended, Tony had failed sixth grade, and his mother, Trineil Petite, went looking for a different option.

I met Tony and his mother last month, when I arrived on the doorstep of their home in Gentilly with Tiffany Hardrick and Keith Sanders, the principals of a brand-new boys-only New Orleans charter school called Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business. Gentilly, a quiet neighborhood of mostly single-story homes, was badly flooded after Katrina. The Petites’ current home, which belongs to Trineil’s 83-year-old grandmother, had been filled with about five feet of water; the front of the house is still marked with a blue X and a zero, spray-painted by a rescue crew in September 2005 to show that the house had been searched and that no dead bodies had been found. (These grim reminders of the flood remain on homes all over New Orleans; down the street, a house still bore the words “DEAD DOG IN HOUSE,” in six-inch-high black letters, with a giant arrow pointing to the front door.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17NewOrleans-t.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Don't get me wrong! I'm glad those kids are getting a better chance. I just don't think the Bush

method of using hurricanes to restructure schools is a very good one. However, he probably thinks

it's just peachy.:banghead:

[Muttocracy]

1. cue Barbara Bush quote. nt