CHICAGO - CHICAGO (AP) Twenty desks - enough to fill a classroom -
sat empty in a downtown plaza Tuesday, each bearing a pair of sneakers
and representing a Chicago Public Schools student killed by gunfire
this school year.
Several hundred more sat empty in city schools, as busloads of teens
skipped classes to attend a gun-control rally - their absences
sanctioned by the district, whose CEO says he's angry that too many
students talk about "if" they grow up, instead of "when."
"This doesn't happen in other countries," Arne Duncan said. "We just
value our right to bear arms more than we value our children, and our
priorities are fundamentally backwards."
Since September, 20 students in the nation's third-largest school
district have died in shootings. Last school year, 24 students were
shot to death, compared with 10 to 15 in the years before.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities
had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with the lowest
graduation rates reported in Detroit, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana
and Cleveland, Ohio, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report, issued by America's Promise Alliance, found that about
half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's
largest cities receive diplomas.
Students in suburban and rural
public high schools were more likely to graduate than their
counterparts in urban public high schools, the researchers said.
Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a
regular diploma and about 1.2 million students drop out annually.
"When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it's
more than a problem, it's a catastrophe," said former Secretary of
State Colin Powell, founding chair of the alliance.
The Cultural Roots of the Dismissive Argument that Obama Supporters Are “Obamamaniacs”
Written by Foresight
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
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As an African American historian of mental
illness in the 19th Century, I am compelled to comment on the frequent
use of madness metaphors to explain the success of Senator Barack
Obama’s presidential campaign. Clinton and the media at large
repeatedly characterize Obama’s historic success and momentum as
“Obama-Mania,” some sort of intangible phenomena in which people are
“spell-bound.” Instead of rallying for support, like any other
candidate, Obama supporters are portrayed as “delusional.” Psychiatric
language may be common place, even ubiquitous in the 21st century, but
to employ it as a way to marginalize and disenfranchise
African-American political momentum certainly has historical roots.
Reports of Obama’s “animal magnetism” and “frenzied crowds” re-occur
in media coverage of political contests, suggesting that supporters are
merely “caught up in Obama-Mania.” 1984 Vice-Presidential candidate
Geraldine Ferraro stepped down from Hillary Clinton's finance committee
after attempts to diminish Obama’s capacities and accomplishments,
asserting his supporters are simply “caught up in the concept” and that
Obama is “very lucky to be who he is.” She added, "It's been a very
sexist media. Some just don't like [Hillary]. The others have gotten
caught up in the Obama campaign."
What is most troubling here is not Senator Clinton’s metaphors or
Ferarro’s bitterness and race-baiting, but how press and lay-people
alike continue to characterize Barack Obama’s political momentum as
something which people are getting “caught up in,” insinuating that
instead of rationally choosing to be political participants, Obama
supporters are operating outside of reality, trapped under some kind of
“spell.” History indicates such language comes to us from 19th century
American psychiatry, where black people were thought to be “morally
insane,” and incapable of free, rational thought.
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