Alabama can't lose right now.......
- Thread starter Russ Wheeler
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No, the way it began was because of race. What you are failing to admit is that our State has yet to entirely rectify that when it comes to K-12 education.
And "many black students attend private schools now"? You can't be serious. Again, appreciate the dialogue. I'm moving on now.
Indianola Gentry is an absolutely terrible public school. You could bus every single kid from Indianola Academy to Gentry and it would still be an absolutely terrible performing school. Private schools are not the problem. Parents that don’t give a crap, school administrators and teachers that are terrible at their jobs, and students that don’t have a desire to better themselves are the issue.
My kids go to public schools, and I know first hand that when a black or brown kid starts showing some promise academically, I know what happens. Their “friends” tell them they are acting “too white” and this is seen as a very bad thing. You know whiteness is evil and no one wants to be considered as “trying to be white”. Fix that issue first and you have a shot to turn it around!
My kids go to public schools, and I know first hand that when a black or brown kid starts showing some promise academically, I know what happens. Their “friends” tell them they are acting “too white” and this is seen as a very bad thing. You know whiteness is evil and no one wants to be considered as “trying to be white”. Fix that issue first and you have a shot to turn it around!
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What isn’t a viable solution is beating around the bush (in any subject).
If a school is unsafe, it really can only be unsafe (in the sense you are talking) Bc of the unsafe students. Adding more sage students isn’t going to make unsafe students safe is it?
Why can’t we get rid of unsafe students? Shouldn’t that be a viable solution?
If a school is unsafe, it really can only be unsafe (in the sense you are talking) Bc of the unsafe students. Adding more sage students isn’t going to make unsafe students safe is it?
Why can’t we get rid of unsafe students? Shouldn’t that be a viable solution?
Quote Originally Posted by JML105 View Post
If that was the only option or I couldn't afford private school I would have to. Along with every other parent, thus changing the "good"/"bad" ratio. That's the idea.
The idea is to find a way to force students into ****** schools and hope they get better? Aside from the impracticality of forcing students into any school (except for those too poor for other options), why focus on moving students into ****** schools rather than moving students from ****** schools?
This makes way more logical sense than anything JBL is saying. Hold ****** schools accountable. Admin, students, all of the above.
If that was the only option or I couldn't afford private school I would have to. Along with every other parent, thus changing the "good"/"bad" ratio. That's the idea.
The idea is to find a way to force students into ****** schools and hope they get better? Aside from the impracticality of forcing students into any school (except for those too poor for other options), why focus on moving students into ****** schools rather than moving students from ****** schools?
This makes way more logical sense than anything JBL is saying. Hold ****** schools accountable. Admin, students, all of the above.
We’ve got a bunch of healthy deer and sick deer. Let’s move the healthy deer to the sick deer to heal the sick deer.
We’ve got a bunch of good obedient labs and a bunch of mutts who can’t do crap. Let’s mix them together and the nutts will learn to fetch, not bark, sit, shake hands.
17ing brilliant. Osmosis I guess.
We’ve got a bunch of good obedient labs and a bunch of mutts who can’t do crap. Let’s mix them together and the nutts will learn to fetch, not bark, sit, shake hands.
17ing brilliant. Osmosis I guess.
https://www.theatlantic.com/nationa...tion-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/
Indianola Academy 2010- 2 out of 434 are black. 80% of the town was black.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillow_Academy
Pillow Academy 2010- 1.7% black
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayou_Academy
Bayou Academy 2010- 1% black
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benton_Academy
Benton Academy 2014- 0 black students
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Preparatory_School_(Mississippi)
Jackson Prep 2014- 3% minority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parklane_Academy
Parklane Academy 2005- 0 black students
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sunflower_Academy
North Sunflower Academy 2018- 2 out of 137 minority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starkville_Academy
Starkville Academy 2016- 8 our of 615 are black
These arent cherry picked, they are ones that I clicked on because I know of them due to size or location. Maybe I missed all the Academies where 'many black students attend'.
Wouldn't this be properly interpreted as racism and/or bullying?
Do the teachers at the school witness this sort of behavior?
If I was the teacher and witnessed this behavior, then I'd nail those 17ers.
Always fun to read your comparisons. This time, minorities are sick animals and lazy mutts.
Yup, I full on chose to focus on that rather than your examples. Do you really not think- 'hmm, how will this look' when typing?
All seriousness, kids at underperforming schools arent a collective contagious sickness or too unable to learn.
I got a little news for yall. Public schools have had "advanced" classes since back in the 60's when they were 100% white. I know from first hand experience.
Thank you for confirming. That comment about splitting students up based on academic abilities was odd to read, since it seemed to suggest that isnt happening.
The demographics are that way because the white students aren’t segregated in another school and the full community is invested in their schools.
Not all private schools are bad. Some give better education than the public schools and the parents are willing to pay good money to get that education. My private school was not better off from an education standpoint and poorly prepared me for college. It was created with the purpose of keeping white kids from black kids. Mine was established in the late 1960s like most others in MS. Why after 1970 are public schools in MS not good enough for whites?
Not filled by local residents? I’m not sure what your definition of a “local resident” is, but I’d guess most positions will be filled by people already here or by people who are expected to move here. Maybe the executive level positions will be filled by generals and such who may be back and forth from DC quite a bit, not sure.
Because you and people like you are more focused on whining about Mississippi's horrible racist history than you are worried about poor children in Mississippi having access to an adequate education in a safe environment today. Yes, it was horrible that whites fled the public schools when schools were desegregated. That's held a lot of places back economically, but that isn't a reason to not consider viable options now. Just as importantly, there have been plenty of school districts fail well after integration. The Hattiesburg school district isn't bad because a lot of white people left. A lot of white people left because the hattiesburg school district is bad. Cleveland public schools have remained a viable option for decades in supposedly the most racist part of the state. I had reasonably affluent relatives graduate from Greenwood high in the late 80's, early 90's. They apparently had one of the few schools where whites fled after desegregation and then came back, and were a viable schools for decades until according to people from there, one bad administrator ruined it. It's not like anywhere in the delta suddenly became more racist in the late 80's. So it's now been roughly three decades of being a pretty poor school (again, according to relatives; I have no clue how it compares to other public schools but I do know that whites that had options went there at least through the 80's). WHile the state would be much better off if there hadn't been white flight after integration and some places that don't have decent public schools now might if there hadn't been white flight, that's not the only problem now and even if it were, short of figuring out how to go back in time and stop it, it still wouldn't change the fact that we need better options for students from poor families.
Our school model is not segregated by race, it's segregated by socioeconomic status. Black people with means do send their children to private schools if the public schools are inadequate. Probably more often, they just move somewhere to where public schools are adequate. But we need to give viable options to students whose parents can't afford to send them to private school and can't relocate to somewhere with decent public schools. And even if shutting down better schools were somehow the solution for bad schools, we can't do that so there's no point dreaming about it.
I'm sure Pillow Academy is not some first class educational institution because it exists to provide an adequate education in a place where the public schools don't, so I doubt they can be selective about who goes there, but I had friends from Pillow in college and they were extremely well prepared for college and they were certainly educated at a challenging and high level and more or less cruised through first year college courses. And that's really all you can ask for in a place with a small population, is that people get educated up to their aptitude. Really, I'm not sure what more you would want regardless of the size of the population. Your high school may have been as good or even better than that, but that would have to mean your aptitude was fairly low.
I have never to my knowledge even come across somebody from North Sunflower Academy, so that may be a fair assessment of it.
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I doubt Greenwood is getting any economic wins anytime soon anyway, outside of home grown things like Viking. These school issues only seem to matter well after most hope is gone.
Yes and no. A lot of the best schools are in places that didn't have segregationist academies didn't have much population period at the time. I don't think the city of Madison or Desoto County had any populaiton to speak of in the 1960's, at least compared to now? They grew (and their public schools grew) in part because of people escaping poorly run cities and schools. Places like Tupelo and the Coast I think are good examples of places that have good public schools because they didn't have as much white flight, although I'm not sure what their demographics looked like compared to state average back in the 60's. Conversely, I don't think Hattiesburg had any segregationist academy and yet it still managed to let a good school district go to ****.
Having white flight to private schools definitely hurt public schools, but we hvae also found ways to 17 up schools without them.
I'm not sure that's true, but to the extent it is, they should be thankful their kids don't have to go to public school. If you are in Mississippi and can afford to spend $6-9k per year per kid for private school, you are very fortunate. And that's still the cheap schools that often spend less per student than the nearby public school. And if public schools had to listen to those parents, the schools would generally get better. That's one reason private schools tend to not be terrible, is because they do have to keep their students parents happy and while there are time that causes them to do counterproductive things, on net, it forces them to at least keep the school decent. But the public schools don't have to listen to them, and so they can't influence the public school in the same way.
And while it's great if your intentions are to send your kids to say JPS (not sure if that's what would be best for your kids, but certainly it would be good intentions), most of the time when I hear people patting themselves on the back for sending their kids to public school, they are in places like Tupelo, Oak Grove, Desoto County, the Coast, Petal, Madison, Magee, Oxford, or even Starkville. They aren't sending their kids somewhere they are worried about their safety and they usually aren't even sending their kids somewhere where kids from good backgrounds don't have access to a great education if they want it.
Well, after three decades of poor public school options and their most educated population having children that generally leave for college and not come back, yea, they are going to be hard pressed to get any economic wins now. But if they had had a good public school for the past three decades and then momentum from Viking, maybe things would look different now. Not sure there is anything to make Greenwood really attractive. It's not on a navigable river (I don't think; I know there are rivers all through there but don't think any of them have barge traffic) and not on a major interstate although it's probably close enough to I-55 to sort of count for north/south purposes, but there are places that do pretty well despite not having any natural advantage just because they have a little luck and then self sustaining momentum.
A city is in a good place (or a really terrible place) if they are complaining about educated professionals being brought in for new jobs. If we had a 1,000 jobs coming into the area, I'd much rather them bring 1,000 new people than hire 1,000 locals. 1,000 new people will generate new jobs, especially if it is 1,000 reasonably well paying jobs, which I assume the space force will be.
That's my point, the hay is in the barn. I'm not sure Greenwood's schools were ever good, and all they did was split students between public and Pillow. They never got a big win back then to keep the momentum, now it's over.
Viking came from within. That's the only hope for towns like that. But then once they get big, they usually sell out and bail, which Viking did. Back to square one.
The point here is, trying to repair a school, in order to try and fix the future, is fool's gold. It's never a bad thing to improve a school, but the likelihood of it making a difference is low. If you do that you better have a damn solid economic driver in the area. Starkville is the best example, but I'm not sure that public school has really improved, it's just holding steady. But MSU was already there, that's not a new conquest.
Not whining. It's a legitimate issue that "people like you" like to bury your head in the sand about.
Funny you brought up Cleveland... I lived there. Are you aware that there are two high schools on opposite ends of town? And it's not a big town geographically or population wise. Do you know what the demographics are in each of those schools? To sum it up for you there are 3 high schools in Cleveland.... The all black one that's "across the tracks", the integrated one that's on "the good side" of town that parents and admin who care are trying their hardest to keep a good school despite the continuous fleeing of students to the subpar Bayou Academy for obvious reasons.
This is just simply not true.
Does Madison/MRA qualify? I guess MRA wouldn't really be considered 'significant' relative to the Madison public schools.
Regarding the other top districts, did they never have segregated academies? Or did the academies die off over time? If they died off, I would argue that they died off due to the presence of a strong public school. I went to private school in Jackson, and I can promise you that there are a ton of parents that would take a good public option over private school tuition in a heartbeat.
Not directed at you, but people tend to paint with a broad brush when it comes to people who attend private school. Sure there is a much higher percentage of truly rich families and there are also a good number of families who see it as a status symbol.....but there are a whole lot of parents who work hard and make sacrifices to send their kids there because they place a high value on education and they are putting their money where their mouth is.
Also, the idea that parents should take one for the team and send their kids to ****** public schools to try and improve the ****** public school system is asinine.
I think you're the one with your head buried in the sand. You still haven't come up with one viable solution yet. All you want to do is call everything racist and be done with it. There are elements of race, and elements of socioeconomic status, like johnson said. He's meeting in the middle, and you're holding to your guns and calling everyone racist. You're the one who is not understanding the situation, here.
Moving on, your pragmatic solution is _______? Me personally, I think the only option is some type of school choice. I don't know how you implement that in rural areas, though.
ETA: Much of schooling is moving away from the traditional model anyway. Online classes, coding academies, practical trade schools, etc. 'High school' is just outdated.
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Add Hartfield to this. Right smack dab in the middle of NWR territory, which is supposedly a 'good school'. And Park Place, which is pulling students from Brandon and Pearl, both 'good schools'.
Madison is the big exception to the rule. I would include Rankin in that as well, but it's not really considered one of the top school districts in the state, although it's definitely above average.
And I agree, if I lived in Jackson city limits or in some of the rural delta towns, no way in hell I'm sending my kids to the public schools. I'm either moving to a good district or paying for private. So yeah, I'm part of the problem too.
And I agree, if I lived in Jackson city limits or in some of the rural delta towns, no way in hell I'm sending my kids to the public schools. I'm either moving to a good district or paying for private. So yeah, I'm part of the problem too.
Okay, obviously I ain't doing a good job at articulating my view point. I am not saying just because you send your kids to an academy that you are racist. I'm sincerely not trying to call everything racist because that's not the way I generally view society at all. So please refrain from trying to take what I'm saying out of context.
ALL I am saying is that Mississippi has dug itself into a hole dating back to integration (or really initial segregation and further back to get real historical) and is moving too slow to get out of that mindset to be able to go all gangbusters like Alabama in referring to your original post. I believe that we all can agree that the whole country's educational system could use some work, but this State in particular is more out of whack than others. My view point is that the abnormal amount of private schools in this state vs public ones has something significant to do with that. True that I have no good solution to fix that, and I have admitted a few times in this thread that I don't, BUT that doesn't mean that it isn't an issue that needs to be resolved over time.
Full disclosure: If I can afford it, I am too. AND this is the complicated problem that has to be fixed. How do the people who want to see our state get better by improving K-12 education for all make our education system more equal than it is across the state?
Nobody is burying their head in the sand. We are the ones acknowledging reality and at least open to solutions other than (1) going back in time and preventing the creation of academies and (2) getting good parents to send their kids to bad public schools, which is only slightly more realistic than option 1.
I was aware that there were two public high schools and also aware that Cleveland's reward for having the most integrated public school system in the Mississippi Delta was a federal lawsuit ordering them to cut it out. Just like some people would rather all poor students in a ****** school district be stuck rather than try things that might not help all of them, they'd apparently rather have a perfectly segregated school system if the next option is an imperfectly integrated one. I don't know how good or bad the Cleveland school district is, but it seems crazy to me that people went out of their way to sue the most integrated and successful public school district in the delta. I guess I'm just unprincipled, but I would have said let's try to copy the most successful school district, even if it's not perfect, rather than sue it. But I would also be willing to let poor people have some of the same options as people with money when it comes to being able to go to the school of their choice.
So you think black parents are like, "17 the kids; we're just going to keep them in an inadequate school rather than send them to a private school we can afford or move to a better district."??? I will concede that I don't know any parents that send their kids to inadequate schools, so it's certainly possible that is common, but I know parents of pretty much any background you can think of that either send their kid to private school or bought their house primarily based on the school district it was in. Although all of the schools in our district are adequate and our kids could go to any one, they are still pretty strongly sorted based on socioeconomic factors. While there is certainly overlap at the lower socioeconomic status, basically all the very high socioeconomic status families are in one of the two best schools at any age group.
Any attempt at a solution should start with JPS. If it can be fixed, literally ANY school system can be fixed.
I've been reading this thread and here is my take....
I grew up in the 60s-70s and was in the thick of the segregation saga. I attended and graduated from one of these 'segregation academies' and their founding was exactly that. They were started to maintain segregation and that was a bad thing. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and today, while there are not many takers, most if not all private schools freely and gladly admit anyone willing to pay the tuition and follow the rules.
I would venture to say that if the attitudes of today existed back in the day the private schools would have never been a thing. But they were and they were started but there is a different dynamic today. The private schools remain open first of all because of 'tradition'. Several generations have attended and folks want their kids & grandkids to experience good old 'whatever high' The second reason is also for segregation but a different kind. A public school cannot deny enrollment of trouble makers but a private school sure can. I understand that the public school system would benefit from more students who are engaged along with their families but the question is would those students be better off? That answer has to be yes at a level that makes it not worth paying tuition and shuttering schools that are beloved and attended by several generations. That is a tough sell.
I grew up in the 60s-70s and was in the thick of the segregation saga. I attended and graduated from one of these 'segregation academies' and their founding was exactly that. They were started to maintain segregation and that was a bad thing. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and today, while there are not many takers, most if not all private schools freely and gladly admit anyone willing to pay the tuition and follow the rules.
I would venture to say that if the attitudes of today existed back in the day the private schools would have never been a thing. But they were and they were started but there is a different dynamic today. The private schools remain open first of all because of 'tradition'. Several generations have attended and folks want their kids & grandkids to experience good old 'whatever high' The second reason is also for segregation but a different kind. A public school cannot deny enrollment of trouble makers but a private school sure can. I understand that the public school system would benefit from more students who are engaged along with their families but the question is would those students be better off? That answer has to be yes at a level that makes it not worth paying tuition and shuttering schools that are beloved and attended by several generations. That is a tough sell.
Was MRA a segregationist academy? I don't know why, but I did not think it was. ETA: I googled and MRA was founded in 1969, so...
I also don't know if University Christian/Hartfield was. ETA: University Christian School was apparently not founded until 1990.
I assumed PCS was not but I'm not sure why I thought that except that it was tiny back in the day and grew when Hattiesburg schools went downhill. But it could have just been a tiny segregationist academy. ETA: PCS was founded in 1975, so I assume not a strictly a segregationist academy if it was five or six years after desegregation, unless it took the place of another segregationist academy.
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I completely agree with you on that. I just though it was interesting the nagging and complaining from people I live around.
Did Brandon Academy rebrand as University Christian School to avoid the segregationist stigma and then rebrand as Hartfield? That's the way to hide a racist past if so. Way better than the first google result showing a founding date of 1969 like MRA's does.
BA changed to UCS when it moved from Brandon to Flowood back in the 1990s / early 2000s. Not sure of the reasoning behind that other than just to change the name since it was no longer in Brandon. Then Pinelake bought it and changed the name to Hartfield. Really, I see Hartfield, and even UCS as being different schools than the old BA, even though technically that's where they came from.
That's probably true but that's why I'd start at somewhere like Starkville or Hattiesburg whose schools have been better in the past than they are now and really shouldn't be bad based on the local socioeconomic conditions. Start with the low hanging fruit and see if you can figure something out there.
New Orleans basically went to all charter schools after Katrina and while they did quickly double the percentage of students that were able to become proficient in high school reading and math, that only meant they got to like 50%, and then they very slowly moved up to somewhere close to 55% I think and it's not clear that they are going to continue improving. That was basically a charter school proponents wet dream as far as a scenario, and while it did result in a huge improvement, I'm still not sure anybody would call the NO system a success. So I would not be optimistic that anybody is going to come up with anything politically feasible that is going to make JPS adequate.
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