Brent's Blog

Expectations and geography

My jaw dropped, too.

We reported this week on the number of Advanced Placement courses taken by Alamance County high school students last year. The numbers varied widely from school to school, especially between the two high schools in the city of Burlington.

At Williams High School, 211 students took 511 Advance Placement courses. At Cummings High School, seven students took seven Advanced Placement courses.

Advanced Placement courses are college-level courses offered through the College Board and taught by the system’s teachers. Students who take end-of-course exams and earn a 3 or higher on a 5-point scale can get credit for the courses at many colleges and universities.

As someone whose employer maintains an online bulletin board allowing anyone to tell me what a complete moron I am, I understand how easy it is to point fingers when you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. I’m not here to do that.

Williams and Cummings have their differences, but the expectations for their future shouldn’t be any different.

It’s very easy to draw conclusions about Burlington by dividing the town up by the railroad tracks and using money scales to judge east and west and the city’s two schools. Those conclusions aren’t always true, but it’s hard not to think that some east Burlington students don’t have the same opportunities as some of their counterparts on the west side of town.

Figuring out how to eliminate such disparities within a school district is a challenge for educators across the country. The Wake County School System, which has been praised by some in recent years for using wealth instead of skin color to divide students up, has seen a recent upheaval on its school board because of anger over that same policy.

Administrators at Cummings face a stiff challenge. Three years ago, the school was on Judge Howard Manning’s list of low-performing schools that were required to take immediate action to improve. It has the highest percentage of English as a second language students and the highest number of students getting free or reduced school meals of any high school in the system.

It’s hard for teachers and administrators to talk about college to students whose home life might be unstable or whose family is struggling to pay the bills. Some kids just don’t come from a family culture that has expectations for college and, at the same time, not all kids need to go to college.

Getting students to sign up for harder work is a challenge. Students who don’t have plans to go to college aren’t going to take on a heavier workload just for the fun of it.

But just maybe, those students could have their minds changed about college, and that change, if it happens, is probably going to happen at their high school. Maybe a high school culture that pushes college could be the difference they need.

One thing is for sure, there shouldn’t be this much of a disparity in college expectations between two schools only a few miles apart, no matter which side of town they’re on.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

Give it to us straight we can take it

Politicians lie.

That saying is one of those truisms that people seem to agree on, like assertions that taxes are too high and Brent doesn’t listen to me.

More often than they lie, though, politicians cover their true intentions by emphasizing some aspects of an issue more than other aspects, those other aspects usually being the more important ones.

I believe, for example, that leaders in Washington pushing for a new public health insurance program want to do so as a first step toward a single-payer system, in which all health insurance is administered by the government.

Start a public option funded by an bottomless pool of taxpayer dollars that won’t exclude anyone because of a pre-existing condition and businesses that now provide private health insurance for their employees will dump those employees into the public option in droves, eventually putting us all in a government-run plan.

I don’t support throwing out our health care system. Others do. What I wish is that they would be honest about their intentions. But too many people would raise too much of a stink about going to single payer, so public option proponents frame it as an innocuous little program that will cover the uninsured and not interfere with your private insurance.

The Iraq war provided perhaps the most stunning case of covering true intentions I’ll see in my lifetime.

I felt we had some reasons to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the Middle East. Bases in a democratic Iraq would allow us to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia, which is what set Osama bin Laden off in the first place. Turning on the spigots in Iraq would provide more of the oil that we will still need for years to come, green technology or not. We can’t depose every dictator, but when getting rid of one aligns with our interests, that’s a good thing.

In the end, these reasons didn’t justify going to war. But if the American people had been told that these were the reasons for invading another country on the other side of the world, they would have balked. And loudly. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. So instead, the war was about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

The more stories I read by our Raleigh reporter, Barry Smith, about the federal stimulus package and how the money is being spent in North Carolina, the more convinced I am we’re looking at yet another classic case.

The stimulus money is going to roads and water projects and schools. It’s funding improvements in medical records and technology

Those are all good projects and are putting people to work, no doubt. But that’s a byproduct.

If the stimulus was truly about creating jobs, there was a better way to do it, by helping private sector employers instead of funding more government.

What the stimulus was designed to do was address a huge dip in tax revenues at all levels of government. Those who passed the stimulus package were more concerned with maintaining the size of government in the face of a recession. But “job creation” sounds a lot better than “government subsidy.”

The voters have put them in charge, so they have the right to do that if that’s what they think is best.

Just be honest about it.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

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- Interstate 40’s route along the Pigeon River at the Tennessee border was never a great plan to begin with. Now the road’s covered with boulders again.
- Are you sleeping too much?
- The most scandalous sexual harassment cases of all time.
- Pabst brewery for sale.
- Twenty-three college presidents earn more than a million.
- Pretty good column by NYT reporter about his son, who poses nude for art students at Penn State.
- Verizon’s new smartphone faces an uphill battle.

- McDonald’s is giving up on Iceland.
- Even Campbell Brown can’t save CNN.
- The ten worst wives and girlfriends in sports history.
- Your Dear Leader story of the day.
- Have to admit, this Levi’s ad is pretty nice.
- Kids watch more than a day of television each week.

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- Obama ties Bush on golf rounds while president.
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- The most hated Yankees of all time.

This photo, sent by Howard Coble’s office, of him in a high-level confab with McGruff the Crime Dog struck me as funny.

“so McGruff, who’s your mother? Were there a lot of other puppies in your litter? Do they live in Greensboro?
My mother’s sister used to volunteer at the animal shelter in Randolph County, that reminds me of a funny story …”

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- The 10 most powerful comic book characters.
- Lumbee bill advances in U.S. Senate.
- America’s 10 most impoverished cities.
- Work First will require more of clients.
- In defense of the dollar.
- Hulu will begin charging in 2010.
- Why isn’t the killing spree in Rocky Mount a national story? I think you know why.
- Five Star Wars questions that keep you up at night.

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

From time to time, and for reasons I never can figure out, I am asked to speak to various groups.

I’ve talked to college classes at UNC Greensboro, to Unitarians at Twin Lakes and to Democratic women. I’m down to address a gaggle of Baptists next month, which will be a first.

I’m no acolyte on par with Frances Woody, so I only get a handful of these gigs a year. I enjoy them and feel comfortable talking to people, which has its pluses and minuses. When you’re too comfortable you don’t prepare very much, which becomes obvious to my audiences after about 10 minutes, when I run out of things things to say off the top of my head.

I get a little nervous, though, with kids. Most adults won’t let you know when you are putting them to sleep. Kids are honest. It’s part of their charm. So they might make faces. They might hold up notes to each other, close enough for you to read yourself, that say “this guy is putting me to sleep.” They might put their heads down on their desk and actually go to sleep.

So I was a little nervous this week as I headed out to Woodlawn Middle School in Mebane to speak to a class of eighth-graders. These weren’t cute little elementary school students. These were the kings and queens of the macabre circus known as middle school.

Here’s what I remember about middle school — three years of ridicule and scorn interspersed with classes, tests and a gym class during which we had to listen to the dance class across the gymnasium’s only record, “Caribbean Queen” by Billy Ocean, three times a day for an entire year.

In those days, I was as gangling as a days-old giraffe with a mouth full of metal and glasses that would make Chicago Cubs’ broadcaster Harry Caray’s seem reasonable. So I probably deserved to be picked on. I didn’t deserve to be put in a trashcan that one time, but picked on, yes.

But I gave as good as I got. The best way for an antelope to survive a lion ambush is to outrun another antelope, and the best way to avert attention from your own goofiness is to point out the goofiness of others.

Middle school abuse is a cultural touchstone for my generation, talked about incessantly in movies, television and books and over beers. Another Times-Newser about my age who went to speak at the same school this week admitted she was nervous. We shared our tales of middle-school terror and said we aren’t looking forward to the day when our children are in middle school.

Here’s the thing, though. It was actually very pleasant.

The children in this eighth grade class didn’t look terrified. Though they poked fun at each other or rolled their eyes when someone asked a question they found silly, they didn’t seem mean about it.

To me, they seemed like a bunch of kids who were all pretty much friends and who gave each other a healthy ribbing. A bunch of nice kids.

To be honest, it didn’t seem far from the kind of ongoing verbal sparring we do where I work.

Maybe today’s middle schoolers aren’t as mean. Or just maybe, my memories of middle school abuse are just just a little bit overinflated.

City editor Brent Lancaster can be reached at brent_lancaster@link.freedom.com or 506-3040. Read his blog at brentsblog.freedomblogging.com.

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- Fifty things that are being killed by the Internet.
- Laura Levine’s work shooting rock n’ roll photos includes a portrait of Bjork that we had on our refrigerator in the house I lived in in college. You can find it here (it’s a little racy, kids).
- Modern man a wimp compared to his ancestors.
- Dylan’s Christmas album gets a positive review.
- The Pentagon pays $400 per gallon of gas in Afghanistan.
- Interracial couple denied marriage license.
- CIA still keeping secret files on agent who worked with anti-Castro Cuban group that clashed with Oswald.

- California may ban bigscreen televisions.
- 30 Rock comes back tonight. Here’s an interview with Tina Fey.
- Another impossibly skinny Ralph Lauren model.
- Surveyed business executives see things improving.