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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

> How can nothing have changed about the school?

When you take away having to deal with problems, good things happen. LOTS of resources can turn toward creating academic achievement. That's how. In my town we have a scourge of overachievers who should be told to go fishing. That's the extent our problems.

The real issue is what causes the problems in poor school districts: Is it being poor? Being black? Are the people who blame "black culture" right? Or is it how we treat the poor and black people, from a very young age?

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>Are the people who blame "black culture" right?

No. Those people are at best misguided, at worst, racist. If white American culture is the standard against which black American culture is judged, I am still waiting for the evidence that white culture prizes scholastic achievement and general intelligence. The only reason geeks and nerds became cool in America is because, suddenly dotcom riches! Until then there was a long history of media & movies that praised jocks and misanthropes above all else. (Hello, Molly Ringwald, hello Grease.) Today's college sports industrial complex is another sign. So is Fox News. So are the yahoos being elected to Texas schoolbook committees. So are creationists. I could go on....

It is probably an extreme example, but there is always "The Street Stops Here", a docu. about Bob Hurley, who is simply obsessed with keeping kids raised in dire poverty out of prison through the education system.

Of course he coaches basketball but that's almost peripheral (although he also loves winning ). His program is tightly integrated with the rest of a Catholic school. These kids live in a state of despair. He will fight this until his last breath. And he does not fight fair. Bob is a retired parole officer.

If anything, the film leaves me with the unsettling feeling that this is a very hard problem. It'd take decades of failure as a parole officer to make one Bob Hurley, and there seems to be only the one.

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