Hangin' with the delinquents

Today I finished up with one of the kids we get through a truancy intervention program. Certain kids are given a choice by a judge to serve their sentence one of two ways: community service in the library or picking up trash along the highway (most kids choose the library.) Until I came along, my library viewed these kids as needing punishment, and gave them grunt work that is both very necessary to the functioning of the library and also mentally deadening at the same time. The real intention of the program, however, is to expose kids to the library and to resources that might contribute to their success at school. These kids are typically required to do 6 hours of service.

Because I had the luxury to do so, I spent almost all of the time working directly with the kid, chatting with him, trying to find out what he is good at and then giving him appropriate tasks. I was lucky this kid (my first one through this program) was nice, polite, and in trouble generally because he was lacking direction, not because he was criminal in some way. More specifically, I think he skips school because he has a learning disability that is something like dyslexia--he says when he does algebra, the numbers sort of swim around and switch places around the "=" sign, and he kept referring to the Ctrl key on the computer as the 'lrtc key.' He said he's confused a lot, and then he's bored. There's a shocker. The best I could do was impress upon him the importance of staying in school, at least to get a diploma, and staying out of trouble. I also stressed that there are lots of people willing to help him with schoolwork (including a whole passel of adults here at the library) if he's willing to ask for it. I don't know if my efforts had any effect, but I sure hope so. He's determined to go into the Army, and I'm trying to withhold judgement about that, since I only know a little bit about his situation.

I am really troubled by this kid because I figured out there was something weird going on with how he interacts with print characters after chatting with him for 15 minutes. I know next to nothing about learning disabilities, so I can't say for sure what's wrong, and maybe I'm just on crack and he's fine. But this kid is 16, he's been in the educational system in this country for 10 years, and nobody's noticed his tendency to move letters and numbers around inappropriately?

I am doubly troubled, because I read this article in the Paper I Hate from NY
about how people who moved out of NYC so that their kids could go to better public schools in the 'burbs are now pulling kids out of those schools and sending them to private schools at tremendous expense. Why are they doing this? Because "they were disappointed by classes that were too crowded, bare-bones arts and sports programs, and an emphasis on standardized testing rather than creative teaching."

The article goes on to paint a pretty dismal picture of public schools in upstate New York, about how teachers lack creativity in the classroom, etc. without mentioning what I consider to be the primary cause of the crappiness of public schools: No Child Left Behind. There have been several alarming articles in the last 6 months about how schools in CA are going to a schedule of 3 periods of math, 3 periods of reading/English, and maybe an occasionaly period of gym. Nothing else. No history, no science, no music, no art, because they don't test for those things. And if you're a teacher and you kids don't do well on the damn tests, your ass is sooooo fired. I'm not sure that private schools are 'held accountable' in the same ways public schools are, which I think was the part of the evil masterplan behind this particular bit of legislation. The purpose of the evil plan is twofold: 1) to destroy our public education system and 2)to make money for the cronies of the administration who stand to benefit from private school tuitions and testing.

If the kid I worked with today came from a family with $$$ his issues might be addressed--he might then go to a school that nutures the artistic talent he clearly has, a school that could get him help with his letters/numbers problem. But he doesn't come from that kind of family, so what has NCLB done for him lately? Did I just spend 6 hours of time (time during which my other work piled up) trying to help a nice kid who's just going to become first a dropout, and then canon fodder? And how far will he make it in his school, which is just blocks from my library where we've been having some pretty serious, and, I might add, terrifying, gang activity in recent weeks?

Thank you, GW, for fucking up a generation in more ways than I can possibly list here:

• cutting funds for community policing
• cutting funds for schools
• cutting funds for libraries
• making schools 'more accountable'
• cutting funds for social services
  
• and
• and...