Black Only Schools Proposed

[piercehawkeye45]

Its potentially a good idea. I know of a black teacher and he says that it is much better for black students to have black teachers for obvious reasons.

I've also heard bad things about magnet schools but I don't know much about them.

[Bullitt]

To me it makes sense that students will/do perform better when they have an instructor that they can identify with and who appears to have a genuine concern for the students' progress. On the other hand, people should not expect these schools to be the magic pill that fixes the dropout rate, etc. The only things can fix these problems are correct and adequate parental involvement, sufficient funding for all schools, and competent leadership for the school system.

It's all about instilling in these kids the idea that they really can succeed in life despite troubled backgrounds, and then providing them with the necessary knowledge to do so. After that it is really up to them whether to be complacent with their current life, or to strive for something better and work hard to get it.

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Its potentially a good idea. I know of a black teacher and he says that it is much better for black students to have black teachers for obvious reasons.

I've also heard bad things about magnet schools but I don't know much about them.

In no way is it a good idea.
How, in anyone's mind, will this prepare any of them for the world or fight the problem of stereotyping?
If they want the kids to have black role-models they need to actively recruit black teachers, without affirmative action, of course.

[monster]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

I've also heard bad things about magnet schools but I don't know much about them.

What sort of things? My kids go to a magnet school and it rocks. The only problem is bussing -becasue it is a public school, they are entitled to be bussed there, but because kids are scattered over the entire school district, that's a logiostical and financial nightmare and some journeys are over an hour long.

Oh and we have fewer black kids than we should. Demographically speaking. Why? Well, the families we have spoken to -who have left the school or got a place then decided not to come- say that they are happier to have their kids in school where there are more black kids. We are too white/asian. Vicious circle.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

I've also heard bad things about magnet schools but I don't know much about them.

We've got a magnet school two blocks from our house. The parents of the kids who attend it love it.

We (the neighborhood) don't care for it too much. You have to enter a lottery to get in and there is only something like a 30% acceptance rate. (We chose not to apply, because we wanted our kids to have friends in the neighborhood instead random connections all over the county. Also, all the schools around us are good, so we saw no need to get into this "good" school.) What ends up happening is that everyone in our neighborhood gets bussed to another (good) neighborhood school a few miles away, and there's a large influx of strangers zooming into our neighborhood every morning to drop their kids off at the magnet school. It's not thier neighborhood, so they don't care about the people who live there or obeying the speed limit. On some occasions, late parents dropping their kids off at the magnet school have blown past our school bus stop as our kids are climbing onto the bus with its lights flashing.

Every couple of years, they look at the enrollments for all the neighborhood schools and shift the boundaries around to get rid of overcrowding in some of them. Since our neighborhood has no school to call its own, we are the ones who always end up getting moved around in order to make things even at all the schools.

So I am bitter at the elitist magnet school families here. I take a skeptical view of magnet schools in general. They are self selecting, so any heightened test scores they have is really just because the best students were removed from the other schools and pooled in one location. This lowers the scores of the other schools and heightens the score at the magnet school.

If you have a kid in a magnet school, it is probably a good thing for them, because they are surrounded by the "best and the brightest," but I think magnet schools may be bad for the school system overall, and there is little or no proof that they offer a better education in an area with already decent schools.

[Michaela]

Our magnet schools are listed as the schools that sceialize in one area or two like math and such. Math genuises go there, etc