$2,000? $5,000?

How much do you think private school tuitions cost?

Atlanta has a wealth of private schools (some, of course, founded after Brown v. Board of Ed), and I've worked in a couple of them, so I checked out a few tuition levels.

* The Howard School: First place I taught, services only students with learning disabilities and ADHD. Great school, it really is. Tuition? []$21,120 for Lower School students and $22,072 for Middle School and High School students.

* Westminster: Very high quality, very churchy. I subbed there in the 90s - one math teacher had more Tim and Beverly LaHaye books in the room than math books. Still, quality school. Tuition? Pre1st -5th $16,450 6th-12th $19,080

* Galloway: A friend of mine went here. Again, very good school. I would send Chris here, if we were closer and I was looking for a private school for him. And if we could afford it. Tuition?
Half Day Program for 3-year-olds: $10,240
8:15 am - 12:00 pm

1 PM Program for 4-year-olds: $13,190
8:15 am - 1:00 pm

2 PM Program for 5-year-olds: $14,890
8:15 am - 2:00 pm

All Day Program: $16,620
8:15 am - 3:00 pm

Middle Learning (8:00 am - 3:00 pm)
Grades 5 and 6: $16,810
Grades 7 and 8: $17,720

Upper Learning (8:00 am - 3:00 pm)
Grades 9 - 12: $17,720

You get the picture. "But what of the Catholic schools?" you say.

St. Pius X
Tuition $10,200
Annual Re-enrollment Fee (non-refundable) $200
Textbooks (approximate range) $350 - $550
Uniforms (approximately) $150

And the crazy fundy school for which I worked in 03-04? Where I wouldn't educate my dog? Starts at $3k per semester for grades 1-3 and goes up from there. Then there are the $300 "book usage fees".

Someone tell me again how vouchers make a difference for poor kids?

I suspect that the schools will become a hot topic again in another month or so, and I have this feeling that we're going to be talking about vouchers. Call it a hunch.

So, what say you, DU? What's your prediction on the role vouchers will play into the fall and where do you stand?

he looked sort of like this:


Now, he looks sort of like this:


We're going to see them this weekend. Or him, anyway - they split up in December, and she responds to maybe one in eight emails from us on average. We'll see if we hear back from her.

Chris is getting old enough now to understand what we mean when we talk about his adoption. I'm curious to see what he makes of Eric, and what Eric makes of him now.

Now, I understand why some of you feel differently about the current bill, and I'm happy to take my lumps on this side and elsewhere. For the truth is that your organizing, your activism and your passion is an important reason why this bill is better than previous versions. No tool has been more important in focusing peoples' attention on the abuses of executive power in this Administration than the active and sustained engagement of American citizens. That holds true -- not just on wiretapping, but on a range of issues where Washington has let the American people down.

I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable. I'm not exempt from that. I'm certainly not perfect, and expect to be held accountable too. I cannot promise to agree with you on every issue. But I do promise to listen to your concerns, take them seriously, and seek to earn your ongoing support to change the country. That is why we have built the largest grassroots campaign in the history of presidential politics, and that is the kind of White House that I intend to run as President of the United States -- a White House that takes the Constitution seriously, conducts the peoples' business out in the open, welcomes and listens to dissenting views, and asks you to play your part in shaping our country’s destiny.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/p...

I just finished rereading Nickel and Dimed. We like to think - we're taught to think - of issues like poverty as discrete things that happen in vacuums as the result of easily definable, blame-able actions. You're poor because you won't get a job. It's upsetting to consider what effect a lack of winter heat might have on a child's ability to achieve in school, and therefore on his ability to pull himself up by his fabled bootstraps.

And it's not as if we lack for alternatives to the easy out of blaming the victim. Yet, that's what we did in 1996, and we did it for votes. No, that's not right - we didn't blame the poor. We fucked the poor and then blamed them for their own fucking, all in the name of a desperate hope that the right wing would stop being mean to us.

So, how's that worked out for us? As a party, as an ideology, as a nation?

that triangulation is essentially an act of aggression against one's own. Truth be told, much as I use the term "progressive", my views used to make me, simply, a mainstream liberal. Even more, a liberal who, in 1992, wanted the first Dem president in 12 years, and the most gifted politician of our age, to regain at least some of the ground we lost under Reagan/Bush I, not lose more at a slower rate.

I'm fine with inclusiveness, but I'm interested in politics because I care about issues, not because I have a particular interest in party labels. If the party chooses to change its stance on issues, either through triangulation or straightforwardly, then I have a couple of choices - but simply putting up with that change quietly isn't going to be the one I pick.

editted 4 speling

So you are saying that you had no control over getting kids to want to come to school? You don't see a problem with this statement at all?

I would suggest that you have not a single clue what it's like teaching in a school like that. Do you really think that these kids didn't want to come to school because I'm not offering engaging lessons? Or because I'm not being fun? I teach special education kids, and at that school, they often came from deeply violent homes, they often came with no food in their bellies, and more often than not they came from parents who were themselves functionally illiterate and who had not enjoyed school. For three years I worked my ass off with kids who couldn't spell their own names reliably in fucking middle school, trying to help them comprehend grade-level texts. I have worked, and will continue to work, with children whose peers actively denigrate learning, with children for whom the street constantly reaches out, with its promises of money and prestige, trying to get them to understand how to graph inequalities and how to decipher an author's point of view. I have worked, and will continue to work, with children who have been told by society that they can't learn and shouldn't try since they were in pre-kindergarten.

And you have the monumental balls to suggest that it's my fault that they don't want to come to school? Fuck that. Fuck that.

Three years ago, I walked into my first public school teaching assignment, in a middle school a mile west of downtown Atlanta. Next Thursday, I'm leaving that school.

It's been at least as much an education for me as it has been for my kids there. I meant to stay longer - I'm leaving because I can't deal with the "leadership through fear" philosophy and tactics of the administration - and I'm disappointed that I haven't been able to do more than I have. I have, though, gotten some perspective on what it means to be truly poor (not the perspective equals understanding) and on how we do education in America.

The kids I've come to know deal with some mind-wrenching violence, including a lot of sexual violence, in their everyday lives. They bring that to school, just as any child brings what she knows in the rest of her life to school. Given the baggage they're given at birth to carry, I've long since stopped wondering why we get sixth graders who don't know their times tables.

If we want to *truly* raise all boats, to *truly* educate all children and give them a chance, the battle has to start long before they ever hit the school door. Is a populist, focus-on-poverty stance risky? We can't afford not to risk it.

The neighborhood is gentrifying now.

The city is in the final stages of closing and razing its public housing units. Along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, in the same neighborhood where Coretta Scott King lived until her death last year, they're tearing down whole blocks of largely derelict storefronts, revealing $250,000 condos springing up behind. And the people who have been here are leaving, to be replaced, one imagines, with people who can afford condos.

I've taught middle school special education in this neighborhood for three years. No matter how Vine City changes, I can forget neither the kids I've met here nor what I've seen them experience.

If you're raised in the middle class, it's difficult to imagine with any clarity what it's like to be deeply poor in the city. Even now, there's a lot I don't think I'll ever understand. The social pathologies I've witnessed are mind-numbing. What makes a child write on a bathroom wall with his own feces? Perhaps the final outrage is that, as the city turns its attention to this area, bringing new buildings and new jobs, it pushes out those who have needed just those things for so long.

In the midst of this, we teach. Perhaps more to the point, we experience daily the hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind as we teach the children who have been pointedly left behind already by the very creators of the law itself. I'm reminded daily of Maslow's hierarchy:



The idea here is that, before one can reach higher levels of functioning, the needs of the lower levels must be met. In other words, if you haven't eaten in 24 hours (or longer), you're not coming to my class ready for problem solving. Yet that is what NCLB requires of my kids.

It certainly isn't that the kids I teach *can't* problem solve, or be creative, or maintain a moral outlook. But to expect them to attain high levels of evaluative thought every day while refusing to adequately address, as a society, what they lack in food, shelter and safety is a deep moral failing in the wealthiest nation on the planet.

They say that we have to address the "achievement gap", in which African-American children achieve at a lower rate than their white counterparts. That much is certainly true. But that goal will not be achieved until we widen our focus to address, not school achievement in a vacuum, but the economic issues that negatively impact the learning of children of all races.

I'm off the fence now.

Submitted by kucinich.us on Thu, 2006-11-16 12:27.

By pulling out of NAFTA, we can return jobs that have been lost, including high-wage jobs in the information technology field. By initiating a WPA-style jobs program that puts Americans back to work rebuilding America, we can create millions of jobs and simultaneously improve our quality of life.

As a nation, we face a predicament of either buy American, or bye-bye America. Unless we cancel the WTO and pull out of NAFTA, corporations will continue to move jobs out of the country and produce goods in developing and third-world nations (with great costs to those countries' workers and environment). In order to buy American, we have to assure that goods are still being produced in America. That's why we must first cancel the WTO and pull out of NAFTA, which have lost us millions of jobs and spurred a soaring trade deficit.

more...http://kucinich.us/issues/jobs.php

"Owe" is a strong word, but I mean it so. I think this is the question underlying the whole Edwards' house thing, and might be something we want to discuss.

It's a no-brainer to me that it's in our best interests, individually and as a group, to address the needs of the poor (immediate and long-term) and enable folks to move into the middle class. But what does that mean? Personal sacrifice and effort, ok, but are there limits? If so, what are they? And what to do to bring about a long-term solution to poverty?

For discussion, if anyone's interested.

but then be pragmatic in the general. Seems to me that this doesn't work well for progressives, particularly in a crowded field. What if we were to turn that around and vote pragmatically in the primaries?

I ask because I'm torn again this cycle. Last time around, although my default candidate was Kucinich, I supported Dean through the primaries and would have voted for him had he not dropped out before the Georgia vote. Dean wasn't the most progressive candidate in the field, but he got (and gets) progressive concerns, and he struck me as the most viable, and happiest, "compromise" candidate.

This time, the media have, of course, crowned Hillary and Obama, neither of whom impresses me particularly for a number of reasons. Not to make this into Yet Another Hillary Thread, but it seems to me that the danger of her, were she to be elected, following her husband's triangulatin' ways and wasting a Dem turn in the White House by getting little of import done is not to be dismissed.

So, what to do? Would all the support the left could muster mean much in the final outcome for Dennis, or does it make sense to look at someone acceptable-to-good (ymmv on this count, of course) who can win over the kind of candidate we know we don't want?

And who would that be? I understand the IWR concerns, but I like Edwards for my money. But that's me. What say you, fellow leftwing freaks?

Many more around the world. It'd be nice to get this in front of the new Congress.

http://www.soaw.org/new/

as we anticipate a Democratic victory tonight, let us move forward in the spirit of humility and brotherhood with our Republican brethren, and...

Oh, fuck that noise.

Y'all, if we do win big tonight (and I'm still holding on to my "ifs" while polls are open - GO VOTE!), it'll only be the beginning of our fight. A lot of damage has been done to our country, and while we have the opportunity tonight to begin repairing it, it will be the work of years to complete the job, maybe the work of generations. You don't cure cancer by merely bringing the doctor into the room.

In almost five and a half years on DU, I've directed a lot of flak at elected folks and officials in my own party. I don't intend to stop that, whether we control all, part or none of Congress this January. If we're on autopilot, nothing that got fucked up in the last six years will be fixed.

This isn't a game, and winning elections isn't ultimately what it's about. Heavy shit is at stake, and I don't want to see the forces the work against the American people embraced and given a generous say. I want the neocons, televangelists, warmongers and raptureheads rooted out of the political mainstream like the snakes that they are.

Two years ago, we spent election night and had that heartbreak at the house with CatWoman and by phone with NSMA. This is my third election cycle with DU, but the test of whether or not a big Dem win was worth it is in the months to come.

Peace.

I'm inspired by KansDem's example to tell you about my little boy. Christopher is younger than Michael - he was 13 months old last Monday. He's a sweet little guy, though. Smart as a whip, too. He was walking before he was eleven months old. He's been saying "yum yum!" when he eats something he likes for a couple of weeks. He's the little imp in my avatar to the left.

Kid's got a sense of humor that beats the band. He even thinks the things he does are funny. Splash water on him in the bath, and he's in stitches. Let him walk over and drop a toy on his daddy's head? His whole face turns beet-red he's laughing so hard.

The "yum-yum" thing? He's not all about the veggies just yet, although he can be gotten to eat carrots, and he does like squash and potatoes a lot. He's a carb boy. Turkey and blueberries are big winners.

And sweet like you never saw. He started giving "kisses" early on, great big open-mouthed things that just leave you on the floor. When I went in to get him when he woke up at 2:30 this morning, he gave me a big sleepy hug around the neck before I took him into the big bed with his mom and me.

One more thing - Chris is adopted. When his birthparents gave him to us, we promised them that we would take good care of him. We have, and we will. I don't need the promise to his birthparents - I love this child more than I love my own life. This child will not fight and die in the stupid wars of stupid presidents. Take that to the bank, and tell your boss.

All best,

John Carle, aka ulysses