I say take government out completely, put churches in charge of social issues like these. None of this halfway faith-based initiative stuff Bush has going on.

Whoever comes up in the near future supporting this ideal I will support and vote for. So far, no one is stepping up.

As Jesus says, the poor will always be with us. Much better for them to actually be with us as neighbors that we can meet and greet and influence with examples of hard work than off in poor people zoos.

See “suburban nation” by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck for more about using city planning to mitigate the effect of poverty through city-planning.

I understand where you are coming from, but I think that you may be giving too much credit to those “parents interested enough to be actively investigating”. Such active investigating is, in my opinion, is far less an indicator of how they prioritize education than actually coming out of you pocket every month to pay tuition. I have learned that people are far less likely to scrutinize a service that they receive for free.

Contrary to popular belief, the rich are not the only people sending their kids to private schools. I sent my first kid to a nearly all black parochial school that sits dead in the middle of the hood. The tuition was just under 300 a month and I was far from being rich. I had to sacrifice personal luxuries in order to do this. This school was very high performing.

Now right next door to this school is the neighborhood public school, which, as commonly is the case, is low performing. Now if those students from that public school become eligible for vouchers, those parents overall are not going to investigate various private schools. They are going to send them to the private school closest to them which is the one next door. Their kids can still walk to school and all that will be required is the paperwork to receive the vouchers and get into a nearby school that has been proclaimed to be better than the public school.

Now here is a real life example. A handful of students at the private school were allowed in at nearly no charge because of their parents low income. These very students were the ones who ended up being the biggest disciplinary problems, yet they were never kicked out.

Going back to my childhood, many kids went to better schools using minority to majority transfers. Many low income parents took advantage of this to sent their kids to good schools, but the kids still brought a lot of disciplinary problems. A single mother who takes some priority in her kids getting a good education still has kids who were deprived of a fatherly influence and often bring the effects of this deprivation to the new school.

Here is an article about how 10,000 children will be jockied about next year:
http://www.newsobserver.com/1056/story/400816.html

Note, the paper says nothing about good or bad neighborhoods … after all … putting them on a bus for hours … it’s for the children.

… they’ve got a thing called “redistricting.”

They say its to make sure all schools are full. That’s partially true. It’s also true they take kids out of nice neighbhoods and nice schools and send them to crappy run-down schools.

That is until the parents can’t stand their little loved ones losing 2 to 3 hours of their life on a bus out of their neihborhood for a sub-par education.

Needless to say, homeschooling and private schools are booming in Wake County.

HUD can use eminent domain to come in and take your property and turn it over for subsidized housing.

Folks, that’s where we’re headed.

What right do you have to tell a private sector property owner who he or she can or cannot rent to? If you have a problem with the tenant, talk to the property owner. If the tenant is tearing up your property, take the owner to court.

I have known bad people on Section 8, and I have known good people on it, just like I have known good Christians, and I have known Christians that give the Gospel a badname-should I cancel the Church because of the hypocrites who don’t seem to know the difference between holiness and whoremongering? I think not. The same thing is true with Section 8.

Not every person that grew up in the hood is a hoodrat, I did (Gary, IN), and I’m not. Neither are most of the people that I grew up with.

Grace to you, and Peace…

Panoplia Soljah
Eph611.blogspot.com

I know people who grew up in subsidized housing, including members of my family, and not all ended up dependent on welfare, so I’m certainly not implying that this applies to all who do. And no matter who owns the home, the government is still paying for a large portion of the rent. Some owners have been sued for refusing to rent to voucher holders, so it’s not all voluntary free-market. – Admin

I agree with this totally, but the same thing applies to school vouchers. Those good private schools are good because certain types of students don’t attend them. We send these types of students to the private schools via vouchers and those schools go down.

Students make or break schools…

The “bolded” lines illustrate the entire rationale behind vouchers.

You speak of “these types of students”… I say that “that type of student” almost always has a parent that will not take advantage of the opportunities offered by a voucher program, even when offerred.

But, if you happen to be one of the caring parents of a child in a school where 70+% of the parents don’t care– thus, the teachers are spending more of their time on discipline and remedial tasks than actually “teaching”… vouchers are the ticket out!

I would also be willing to wager that “voucher children”– those from parents interested enough to be actively investigating the potential gains offered by changing schools through a voucher program– will not appreciably affect the overall quality of the school attended…(of course, this means the teacher’s unions and public schools are correct in being worried by the voucher movement- they are being left behind.)

While this is an Eminent Domain issue, the parallel to the current discussion is politicians meddling in the free market of housing. In both cases it is out and out property theft with taxpayers bearing the brunt of foolish politicians.

With Poletown, the poor to middle-class people, as a tax-base, didn’t look as profitable to Mayor Coleman as the potentially larger tax revenue from the GM plant. Most of the former Poletown residents moved outside of Detroit city limits and now the plant is going to bring $0 in taxes.

Way to go Liberals!!!

Ciao

Of course it’s terrible and needs to be corrected. But this does not disprove that areas with a stronger police presence are better than before O’Malley as I mentioned.

Hopefully this will be enough for people not to want to elect O’Malley to higher office.

Ultimately the crime is a sort of reflection of the people in the city.

As I say the real “ism” that is a problem is THUGISM. And we know the Section 8 areas have plenty of it. Existing Section 8 areas in the city should not be spread to other areas in the state.

Let’s be honest, the people who buy in higher classed areas worked hard to move away, in order to avoid the mess. Or as my friend BJ Ellis says, “they did not forget where they came from, THEY ESCAPED”.

A mix of video and text:

http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7057074/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/video/7380035/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7056945/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/video/7103408/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7097697/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/video/7627244/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/station/7366021/detail.html
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/7379947/detail.html

In theory yes, but all to often when government puts money into an institution, things change. There have already been suggestions regarding current voucher proposals that vouchers students in parochial schools be allowed to skip religion classes and religious ceremonies.

Government always makes demands when it puts money into something and I doubt that those private schools will be quick to kick the government out, especially when they are in jeopardy of losing that voucher money and appearing insensitive to the voucher students. What will happen in my opinion is that the a voucher system can and will create an extended public school system that includes former private schools and a whole school voucher bureaucracy.

Except that private schools are private, and therefore get to accept or deny individuals the right to attend. Personally, if I were responsible for a private school, I’d be scared to death that accepting vouchers would then mean that I’d lose the right to refuse certain applicants – in which case, I’d agree with you. I’d rather go the other way – allow public schools to actually expel students who refuse to do the work and/or who cause problems with other children learning. The problem then is what to do with them…putting them in institutional schools might be an answer, or not – I don’t know. But having them in public schools just reduces the quality of the public schools.

However, when the choice is heavily concentrated area of public housing or dispersed low concentration, Dispersed low concentration is preferable.

As I mentioned I am speaking from my own conversations with people who actually live in the high crime areas. Actual family and friends. Not stats.

When you see less bullets flying by your house and more cop cars do you need a TV crew to run the numbers to try and tell you that you’re not really better than before?

Not to say that every area was made better. But some of the areas of focus were improved and it was done with a stronger police presence.

The bottom line is that “my people” said they felt safer and when going to visit them I saw less junk in the area.

Please provide links to the WBAL (TV 11 Baltimore) news reports for review.

O’Malley is more than just a Liberal, he’s a partisan Bush hating Liberal. I don’t like that at all. But the facts are the facts. He did help make some areas safer than they were before.