Reply #28: Lots of reasons...

[Chan790]

none of which Michelle Rhee wanted to address. Why engage the root causes of the problem when you can engage in crack-pottery.

It starts with lack of parental involvement in the lives of students. It's not all parents, most DC student's parents I know are involved...but I work down the block from the Columbia Heights educational campus in a bank...I see these kids weekly and I see their parents, well most of them. The kids doing the worst in school (and they're obvious)...I don't know their parents. The truants coming in at noon to make a withdrawal on school days, I don't know their parents. We're a community bank...we're involved in our community, a heavy sponsor of programming and events in this community. We offer free finance seminars to residents on how to manage their expenses and save for life-events. It's not incorrect to say I know 90% of the people living within a 1/4mi. of our branch, whether they bank with us or not.

There is also a lot of bad spending going on...it's possible to spend a lot of money on the wrong stuff and not achieve anything. For example, you should look up Ms. Rhee's salary. She's pulling more a year than the mayor and in the meanwhile Garfield HS is decrepit, the teacher to student rate is almost 30:1, remedial programs designed to catch the "slow kids" up are under-funded...and Rhee's funneling money off to fund charter academies. Her other brilliant idea was to pay students a "salary" to show up. That's money that could have fixed the infrastructure of the school, funded educators, purchased books. Do the math. Approximately 18,000 junior-and-senior-HS students in DCPS x ~$40/week x ~40 weeks in the school year. Figure that even 15% of them are truant and it's no surprise that DCPS spent $20M this year (last school year) bribing kids to show up.