Jackson Jambalaya

Administrators paid too much.
Teachers paid too little.
Schools more concerned with how to take tests and not how to be productive. AKA focusing on scores instead of actual knowledge.

Until those are fixed, the kids are screwed, and the rest of us along with them.

KINGFISH, ARE YOU NOT ALLOWING YOUR POST TO BE FORWARDED? IF SO, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK. THERE IS A PROBLEM. T H A N K S

Until the first grade teacher makes as much as the football coach you will not see real education going on in Mississippi.

Until you see as many parents at a PTA meeting as you do the athletic booster club meeting you will not see real education in Mississippi.

Until kids quit having kids, you will not see real education in Mississippi.

Until parents (2) start acting like true parents with love, respect, and discipline in the homes, you will not have real education in Mississippi.

3:00 why are you yelling?

Who'd ever thunk it?

A friend is married to a former JPS teacher who taught "gifted" kids. They regularly run into her former students around town, most of whom are working at Wal-Mart or as bus boys. She thinks that maybe 1% of her kids went to college, and even fewer finished. She believes that more of her students are dead or in jail than went to college.

And these are the gifted.

How the hell can JPS brag about anything when all they are doing is training the city's janitors and garbagemen?

She also had to put up with about 12 different principals over 20 years and only a couple were worth a damn (her words). Most were just warming a seat and collecting a fat paycheck.

You know, in the 60s the Federal government sent troops to Mississippi because the white establishment was preventing black kids from getting an education. Maybe it's time to send the troops in again, because it sure seems like the black administration is doing the same damn thing.

Hitler finds out that public education is flawed with students walking the halls, texting mindless drivel.

3:21

Are you suggesting that current teachers don't teach well enough because they don't get paid as much as a football coach?

Or are you suggesting that current teachers are inferior and can never teach well enough because of the pay scale and therefore unqualified individuals are actually teachers?

Money is not the problem. Teachers in other areas, other schools, etc make the same money and kids excel.

A culture of personal achievement is more important than anything else. Guess what? That's more than in the classroom. That's on the ballfield, at home, in the community, etc.

But let's keep looking for excuses, assessing blame, and throwing money at it... that's worked so well so far.

Statistical differences between Mississippi students and those in other states are almost entirely accounted for by external factors like single mothers, poverty, and --whether we like it or not-- racial disparities in test performance. In fact, it's not just Mississippi. Look at Texas. Suburban public high schools in Texas are among the very best in the country, but its overall rankings are mediocre because it has more poor single parents, who are disproportionately minority. States like Minnesota and Wisconsin, by comparison, do much better in the aggregate --even though their best public schools are no better-- because they are working with fundamentally different demographics.

The idea that slightly higher paid teachers (or better incentivized teachers, or more tested kids, or less tested kids, or whatever) can overcome the collapse of families, communities, and standards throughout large swaths of the population is laughable. When you demand that educators solve problems that are far beyond the system's capacity, you are effectively telling them, "Massage the numbers to fake doing the impossible." We shouldn't be surprised when they do.

Hasn't this poor ol' daid hoss been flogged just about enough on this site? There's not one of us here who cannot identify the elephant in the (class)room...we keep bemoaning the same things...the things that are not likely to change in the foreseeable future. Anonymous 3:21 summed it up tidily.

9:21 (oh, it does wring my withers to start a sentence with a numeral---I promise, my public-school teachers taught me better---but "Nine Twenty-One" just looks...odd) laid it out plainly. Given our demographics, are the pitiable results any great surprise?

Demographics may be a symptom, but poor black kids don't underperform in school because they're black. They underperform, along with any other race, if they aren't taught at home. Take every other factor - race, money, standardized test results, whatever - and put them on one side of the scale and they'll always be outweighed by how much the parents care about their children's education. Parents who don't care, whether black, white, brown or otherwise, will seldom have kids who get a good education, whether they live in inner city Jackson or Madison, and parents who care will find a way to get their kids educated no matter what color they are or where they live.

Bill, perhaps you should re-check the definition of the word "demographic". No one here, I feel quite certain, would disagree with a word you wrote, but "black" just happens to be the population of the JPS, so that's the population we're talking about. It's the...uh, demographic. It is not "racist" (oh, dear, puh-leeeease) to make an impartial observation, and do the math.

I may have been mistaken to assume from your comment that you meant black students, seeing as how were responding to a post about racial disparities, and I apologize if I misunderstood. I was merely trying to cut to the chase in my response to your comment. I'll restate it in more politically correct terms: Poor performance in school isn't due to a child being in a particular demographic. Poor kids, regardless of race, will get a good education if they who have the type of home life that encourages a good education.

8:33 am What I am saying is that we are paying football coaches more than first grade teachers. If we were to pay first grade teachers the same (not more) we may get more people into teaching with better minds. You seem to think that the football coaches are worth more than those that actually teach skills that will impact the student and his family for years to come.

This is not throwing more money--let's just lower the salary of the coaches. Let's see and hear the screams of the booster club when the quality of coaching decreases.

Bill at 1:13. Agreed. Everyone should read Ben Carson's autobiography to see how high a destitute black child of a single mom can rise when he is told he is smart enough to achieve anything he wants.

Parental support, guidance, encouragement and attention overwhelm every other "demographic" feature.

Cyclical poverty and sad home lives of Mississippi students are definitely a factor in poor educational outcomes.

But saying or implying that a child who is from a poor and/or dysfunctional family can't learn if he has access to a decent education is wrong.

In other words, saying "the blacks are so screwed up that they can't learn" is a disgusting and pathetic excuse for laziness and maintaining the status quo in this state.

Yes, it is much harder to education a student whose parents never taught him his ABC's and 123's. But stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. Mississippi has many intelligent children who don't have the opportunity to learn because they don't have access to decent schools.

KIPP Delta schools in Arkansas, for example, properly educate "at-risk" kids from unfortunate demographics, most of them African American, every day.

Mississippi public schools should do the same thing.

Anyone know why Bigger Pie Forum site is down?