HereÂ’s a statistic for you.

Every 10 minutes, a teenager in Texas is getting pregnant, and with the nation's third-highest teen birth rate, Texas stakeholders have announced a "teen pregnancy crisis."

I guess it is no wonder that I started the school year with three mothers among my 60 ninth grade girls, and one more pregnant to the point of bursting. IÂ’m sure that there will be several more pregnancies before the year ends. And the sad thing is that IÂ’ve reached the point where IÂ’m not even surprised by the extent to which teen pregnancy happens among my students.

Posted by: Greg at 09:31 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 114 words, total size 1 kb.

However will the hoity-toity liberals in HarvardÂ’s ivy-covered halls survive?

Gone are the hot breakfasts in most dorms and the pastries at Widener Library. Varsity athletes are no longer guaranteed free sweat suits, and just this week came the jarring news that professors will go without cookies at faculty meetings.

By Harvard standards, these are hard times. Not Dickensian hard times, but with the value of its endowment down by almost 30 percent, the worldÂ’s richest university is learning to live with less.

Color me unimpressed. Why donÂ’t these yahoos try to make do on what my district spends on educating a student?

Oh, the humanity!

Posted by: Greg at 09:02 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.

IÂ’ve never been a fan of the notion that schools, rather than families, are responsible for all the basic needs of kids. But now one school district is making the feeding of students a criteria for evaluating schools and their administrators.

In a locally unprecedented move, the School District of Philadelphia will hold principals accountable for the number of students eating breakfast in their schools.

Breakfast participation will be part of the report card that rates principals each year, along with categories such as attendance and math and reading performance.

All 165,000 students in Philadelphia public schools, regardless of income, are eligible for free breakfasts. But just 54,000 ate breakfast last year, district figures show.

The new system, which begins this year, is expected to increase the number of students eating breakfast, said Jonathan Stein, a lawyer with Community Legal Services, whose efforts - along with those of Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY) - helped bring about the move.

Now set aside the argument that the school system should not be feeding every kid on the taxpayer dime because that is not one of the missions of a properly run system of education. But what does it say when we require a principal to discourage parents taking responsibility for the care and feeding of their own kids as a part of determining whether or not the principal (and the school) is doing his/her job? What we are encouraging in such situations is nothing less than womb-to-the-tomb dependency on government rather than self-sufficiency and personal responsibility.

What next? Feed the kids dinner before leaving school? Or perhaps turn-down and mint-on-the-pillow service provided by the district, which will ensure that all students get to bed at a reasonable hour?

Posted by: Greg at 11:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 307 words, total size 2 kb.