KB, right on.

I think teachers have had to play so many roles in students' lives since the crack era. And I find that, in the current education debate, most people are completely clueless about these day-to-day demands. This prevents effective, realistic and just problem solving.

The problems so many kids bring from home and the lack of parental encouragement, support and even simple availability make the case AGAINST teacher evaluation based on test scores...so many of these kids are coming in with 2 strikes on them. How can they succeed as students? Going back to their early childhood, are these kids being read to as toddlers? Often not even SPOKEN to very much except for disciplining--their vocabularies are significantly less developed than kids from middleclass homes. There's a generational chain of teen dropout parents (and so often just the mother)in poverty with all the accompanying syndrome--drugs, alcohol, abuse. See "The Other America" by Harrington, "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Friere. Attack the root causes of poverty!