Just what the hell's going on in London?
- Thread starter Mr. Tea
- Start date
N
nomadologist
Guest
no. but if she can't afford food for her kids, has to work a night shift or shitty hours and can't afford proper child care, then you have "latch-key kids" who grow up without adult supervision and don't have 24/7 guidance or even a watchful eye making sure they behave and do their homework, etc.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Of course - but surely that situation is all the more likely if there's no father around?
In any case, many of the kids we're talking about (in Britain, at any rate) come from families with chronically unemployed parents, who surely have far MORE time to spend with their kids (if they want to) than working parents?
In any case, many of the kids we're talking about (in Britain, at any rate) come from families with chronically unemployed parents, who surely have far MORE time to spend with their kids (if they want to) than working parents?
N
nomadologist
Guest
But if they're not educated themselves, even if they're unemployed and around, they don't know how to give their kids advice that will, say, help them get into college.
and in the U.S., two minimum wage jobs can't take care of a whole family. one minimum wage job can barely feed a grown man. so no, it wouldn't be better to have a father around in that case. it would be worse on the budget
and in the U.S., two minimum wage jobs can't take care of a whole family. one minimum wage job can barely feed a grown man. so no, it wouldn't be better to have a father around in that case. it would be worse on the budget
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
If low-income jobs in America really pay that little, then that's terrible, but (once again, in the UK) I can't think of a situation in which a child would be (financially, at least) better off with one working parent rather than two. In any case, we have child support over here, which may not be loads but does at least make it easier for one parent (either one) to work while the other can stay at home to look after young kids.
N
nomadologist
Guest
yup, sounds like you have a much better situation over there
(minimum wage, last time I checked, was $5.15/hour)
(minimum wage, last time I checked, was $5.15/hour)
Gavin
booty bass intellectual
Yes, $5.15/hr is the national level, but most states have higher minimum wages. Of course, these rates are still egregiously low considering the lack of basic benefits that go along with most minimum wage jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_minimum_wages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_minimum_wages
Guybrush
Dittohead
This almost looks like an election map:
What’s up with American Samoa? I heard something about shady dealings involving Nancy Pelosi, but I don’t know how reliable the information was. Does anyone know anything about that?
matt b
Indexing all opinion
Black pupils 'are treated worse'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6413265.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6413265.stm
Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
This is an obscene piece of buck-passing on the part of the DfES. For 10 years schools have been under pressure to contain thier budgets and standardise their academic performance, while thier community function has been undermined by the government's parental choice inititives. All of these things mitigate against treating children as individuals, with dire consequences for those at the bottom of the pile - not just children from minorities, as highlighted here, but white working class children, or those with special needs, mental problems, etc.
In a manufacturing enviroment, it makes no sense to keep the defective parts - they get thrown out and written off. The government has spent the last decade turning Britain's schools into academic assembly lines - and now they turn on the teachers who have been forced to adopt the logic of the asembly line, and try to blame them for stereotyping kids. It's pathetic.
The DfES has no concept of what teachers actually go through. I know several teachers and most have been involved in dismissals - without exception, they regard it as a personal and professional failure for any child under thier charge to be expelled or suspended. But if a child is posing a safety risk to other pupils and staff, or seriously damaging the learning of others through disruption in class, what choice do they have? Schools desperately want the resources to treat these cases individually, but the government won't give it to them, so they have to be excluded - moved on, filed under 'someone else's problem'. Only a DfES mandarin could seriously believe that teachers don't lose sleep over that situation.
It's absurd to compare school exclusions with police stop-and-search laws. Even post-MacPherson and De Menezes, police accountabliity is practically opaque. In a system where police can kill a man for carrying a table leg and get away with it, you would have no chance whatsoever of holding an individual officer to account for a stop-and search incident.
Schools, on the other hand, are regulated and inspected to within an inch of thier lives. OFSTED can perform a full inspection on any school at short notice, get access to any area of the school, comment on individual teachers, and make recommendations about school staus and funding which determine it's future. Can you imagine the shitstorm the police would kick up if the government tried to impose a similar inspection regime on them? It absolutely would not happen.
Here's a point I was going to make in response to your last post, Matt, but I didn't find the time. In a sense, OFSTED has done the job it was set up to do. There are no consistantly 'bad' schools in the UK state sector now, which is a victory for OFSTED, because in the 80s there was a genuine (though exaggerated) problem with the culture in some state schools, and their accountability to thier communities. Obviously there are still transitory management issues at individual schools, but they don't persist because government and local councils now have such sweeping powers to remove and replace senior staff, or even the entire school. So why has this had such a minimal efffect on academic polarisation along class lines (other than, arguably, to make it worse)? Because a school is only as good as it's intake. This is the deeper problem behind the superficial rhetoric of 'failing schools' that the creators of OFSTED didn't address - either because they misdiagnosed the original problem., or (more likely) they baulked at the sheer scale of it. Far easier to blame the teachers, who are close to hand and can be directly punished/controlled through thier pay packets.
If you surveyed teachers in Britain, hardly any of them would say that they spend too much time on pastorial work and assessing individual pupil's needs, and not enough on thier subjects - if they felt that way, they would be lecturers, not teachers. The overwhelming majority of teachers want to spend more time on individual care and less on assessing academic performance against universal standards. So if the government is serious about giving schools the power to operate within thier communities and work with children on individual development, it has an army of teachers willing to take thier work in that direction. What holds it back is a plain lack of political courage - because it would mean reversing the parental choice reforms that treat schools as services in a free market, and families as isolated consumer units, and it would mean ploughing a lot more taxpayers money into eduction to set up the extra-academic funtions that would be needed in schools. And as I've already said, governments are only prepared to write blank cheques to incarcerate children, not to educate them.
Even as the funding pot gets smaller, the demand on schools gets bigger: increasing immigration is putting extra pressure on schools to find translators and fund basic english classes. If the government had the vision and political courage, it could act now to set up a new breed of inner city schools that focussed on integrating the individual child, from whatever academic base or cultural background they happened to start on, into a mutually benficial multi-ethnic community with the school at it's centre. This would be a huge step in addressing the alienation behind so many of the problem currently apparent in the UK, from the south London shootings to the tube bombings. But I'm not optimistic. The DfES is stuck in a time warp of leafy grammar schools prepping tomorrow's future stars for oxbridge entrance, while the grateful proles go off to learn a useful trade, doffing thier caps as they leave - like Alan Bennett's The History Boys on permenant loop. Because if you look at the civil servants and policy advisors who make the decisions, that's overwhelmingly the background that they come from.
In case after case, from parental choice to PFI initatives like the Paddington Academy (see the spin ws. the reality), the DfES panders to the imagined predudices of middle england while treating the futures of underpriviliged kids with contempt. So when those kids go off the rails, obviously, it's the teacher's fault.
Gahhh! *blood boils*
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Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
Shit yeah, got my sinister government acronyms confused! I'll edit the piece, to avoid any confusion (not just my own blushes).
matt b
Indexing all opinion
on the whole i'd agree- league tables in particular have led managers and (to some extent) teachers to encourage exclusion in order to make results look better. more often than not the excluded kids then have nowhere to go -due to funding cuts etc, leading to boredom, and the anti-social behaviours discussed upthread
OFSTED's powers were changed a few years ago and now almost soley focus on what goes on in the classroom during observations- they don't focus on the role of management half as much as they used to. OFTED just isn't that good- there are still some 'failing schools'- this one* has an awful reputation, although i don't know enough about it to know how much is down to management/teachers/pupils.
middle class flight from 'the local comprehensive' in certainly a big problem too
re: pastoral care (and the lack of), links to communities and 'production lines'- by the time i come into contact with students (16-19), they often consider education to be soley about gaining qualifications (e.g. 'do we need to know this for the exam?'), not about exploring the world around them or their place in it. you could argue they subliminally see themselves as little units for universities and employers to 'consume'.
however, i do think that racism exists in some classrooms- research has suggested that teachers find students most like themselves easier to teach and better students. as most teachers are middle class, this may lead to indirect discrimination against other groups.
an excellent post, btw.
*not my work, rather ridings school
OFSTED's powers were changed a few years ago and now almost soley focus on what goes on in the classroom during observations- they don't focus on the role of management half as much as they used to. OFTED just isn't that good- there are still some 'failing schools'- this one* has an awful reputation, although i don't know enough about it to know how much is down to management/teachers/pupils.
middle class flight from 'the local comprehensive' in certainly a big problem too
re: pastoral care (and the lack of), links to communities and 'production lines'- by the time i come into contact with students (16-19), they often consider education to be soley about gaining qualifications (e.g. 'do we need to know this for the exam?'), not about exploring the world around them or their place in it. you could argue they subliminally see themselves as little units for universities and employers to 'consume'.
however, i do think that racism exists in some classrooms- research has suggested that teachers find students most like themselves easier to teach and better students. as most teachers are middle class, this may lead to indirect discrimination against other groups.
an excellent post, btw.
*not my work, rather ridings school
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Indigo
Wild Horses
Very sad
I was born in London but I've grown up her in American. I was thinking of returning to England since America seems to just be going downhill. It's always been bad for black people here but it seems that England has it's fair share of problems. I guess there is no where in the world where black people can live in peace.
The excuses as to why life is hell for black people in England is the same rhetoric that I see said here in America. It's all crap. It seems that both America and England (all Europe?) are racist neo-colonial sh**ters who prefer that people of color be gone unless there is a broom to be pushed around.
I was born in London but I've grown up her in American. I was thinking of returning to England since America seems to just be going downhill. It's always been bad for black people here but it seems that England has it's fair share of problems. I guess there is no where in the world where black people can live in peace.
The excuses as to why life is hell for black people in England is the same rhetoric that I see said here in America. It's all crap. It seems that both America and England (all Europe?) are racist neo-colonial sh**ters who prefer that people of color be gone unless there is a broom to be pushed around.
owengriffiths
Owen
What I can't get my head around is the easy availability of guns in English cities. You might be surprised to hear that in Northern Ireland things are qite different. Here the only ones with access to guns are paramillitaries and a few unafilliated criminals. It really isn't in the paramilitary's interests to sell guns to punters like they sell E's & coke, part of their power relies on the fact that they more or less have a monopoly over gun ownership. Clearly English crims arent playing by the same rules.
Would I be right in assuming that 10/15 years ago the only people who had guns were high level crims? Were deaths by stabbings a lot higher than they are now to account for this?
To me it seems strange that gun dealers are even about. Surely there is not much money to be made from it, given that they are expensive items sold dirt cheap, and that the courts should (in theory) throw away the key for anyone caught selling them
Would I be right in assuming that 10/15 years ago the only people who had guns were high level crims? Were deaths by stabbings a lot higher than they are now to account for this?
To me it seems strange that gun dealers are even about. Surely there is not much money to be made from it, given that they are expensive items sold dirt cheap, and that the courts should (in theory) throw away the key for anyone caught selling them
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I think guns are quite cheap 'wholesale' now, as it were - many of them come from former Soviet Bloc countries or China, and a lot of them are actually air pistols or model guns that have been converted to fire live ammo. Judging from the papers there must be a whole 'cottage industry' of gun converters in the gang world at the moment.