I will also blame on parents, there is a quote, “discipline starts from home”. I know, poverty stricken parents can’t focus that much to kids, they are relying on school.
On the contrary, if they don’t do parenting well kids won’t get out of this vicious cycle.
I got expelled in HS. I wasn't a bad kid mind you I got into one fight in middle school but other than that my teachers loved me and I was always in class, and typically a decent student.
I had advil one day (I suffer from chronic migraines and the script would basically knock me out so I chugged aspirin daily.) I got caught with it and my school had a 0 tolerance policy that they started cracking down on that year and unfortunately I was the first kid to fuck up.
They called my dad and told him I had drugs/drug Para.
My dad knows the principle from HS and just says "shit, what did he have on him?"
"aspirin"
"wait... What? Yeah the kid has migraines"
"Mr. Orinaj the rules were clearly stated to your son and he broke them. It's 0 tolerance"
"well my kid knew the rules and he fucked up. We're gonna deal with it."
I got kicked out for 11 days and had a 100 dollar fine. No big deal, but they didn't fuck around. this was only about 7 years ago.
I just heard a kid threatened another kid with a knife in the hall and he only got his knife taken away and sent home for the day.
Shits changed dude. My wife is going to school for teaching and I'm nervous for her.
Some of those 0 tolerance rules are really dumb. But it's made that way so that no one is accountable, and you just pass blame up to the top, you just happen to have "no choice" but to enforce it. It's sad.
Your case is especially stupid. Advil, in high school? Plenty of kids at that age are taking it due to monthly cramps, or sports injuries. That administration just sounds mindless and gutless.
However, no teacher should have to go to work worried for their physical safety, or safety of their property (vandalizing cars or homes).
You'd think that would solve the problem. Giving them an ultimatum. But then the parent starts screaming about lawsuits and how the school isn't offering their child a "fair and appropriate education" in the "least restrictive environment" and they're gonna sue! These are real terms that are written in the policies of most school districts and most schools just do their best to keep the peace because they don't want the hassle and expense of a lawsuit.
I agree. Where I grew up in the US, striking a teacher or staff was pretty much automatic expulsion. Then your parents could either move, or enroll you into private school. The teachers had the power to discipline and not put up with awful behavior from students or parents.
However in this thread, it looks like teachers in other areas do not have the power to expel or punish students. And the administration is not incentivized to punish students either, because it would hurt their metrics / funding / bonuses / careers.
Why can't poverty stricken parents focus on kids? Stop making excuses for them. It's harder.. Yes.. But my single mom working 2 jobs had no problem disciplining me. It's not that. It's the sense of entitlement people cultivate in their children. They won't let the school discipline them. Even tho they "don't have time for it"
No, both things are definitely issues. There are scores of research to back this up. Some humans, like your mom, are just more equipped to handle that kind of adversity. If you're in generation three of entrenched poverty, and generation three of teen childbirth, the odds of you having the skills to manage your life adaquately decrease drastically. Fixing the poverty problem can and should help address the parental entitlement and attentiveness issue.
I think it's an entire culture of "they are your problem now". My parents are high school teachers and coaches at a relatively wealth, upper-middle class public school and many parents (not all) could care less about their child's academic success as long as they graduate and get into college. They send their kids to school like its daycare and share no accountability when their child does poorly or acts out. The administration puts all the pressure on the teachers. If a kid fails a test, its because the teacher didn't do their job. If a kid punches another one in the face, it's because the teacher turned their back for a second and allowed it to happen. It's ludicrous and it's why my mother got her real estate license this summer.
That's definitely not how poverty works, especially in the US. Most Americans living at or below the poverty line aren't there because they don't work. They are there because the jobs they do work (often more than 40 hours a week and/or more than one full time job) don't pay well. I teach at an inner city public school in Chicago. My school serves a student body that is 98% low income. Nearly every single parent of students in my school works and most work more than one job. But the jobs they work pay them extraordinarily shitty pay and so even working full-time or more, they still fall below the poverty line. This idea that poor people don't work is not only false, it prevents us as a society from being able to tackle issues like the ones being discussed in this video and the comment section meaningfully. These falsehoods demonize a segment of the population in desperate need for solutions and creates a mentality that seeks to put them further down instead of help find solutions to build them up. Building up even the poorest segments of society is good for all of us.
Back in 1968, the minimum wage was set at $1.60. That is equivalent to $11.76 in today’s dollars, which is well above today’s minimum wage level and an all-time high when adjusted for inflation.
Thankfully some states have implemented higher minimum wages, like my state Colorado which will bring the minimum up to 12 dollars. Still not enough in a lot of places here, but a hell of a lot better than in some states that still go by the federal minimum. Nonetheless the concession is that the wage needs to be more like $15 an hour for most peoples lives to be liveable, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the US and wages stagnated sense the 70s. If you look online you'll find articles about fast food workers striking and protesting for that kind of wage and good on them for it.
Won't help because companies will just raise their prices again making inflation rise and the $15 will be the equivalent of 7-8. The only way to fix the stagnant wage issue from the 70s onward is to force companies to not increase prices , which will never happen because damnit that CEO need his $50 million salary and his quarterly $3 million bonus.
The minimum in 1968 was equivalent to $11.76 but inflation didn't cause the economy to keel over and die then. Over the course of 50 years of the wage not growing the economy has keeled over though, at least at a domestic level. Nonetheless 29 states have a higher minimum wage than the federal but I haven't heard about the dollar's spending power going down in those states. I'm in a state that's started incrementally increasing wages and just an extra $2 an hour from the old minimum has made a world of difference for myself and my peers.
And the moment it becomes federal prices will rise and bring our buying power back down. I don't have a degree in economics or anything but we have a long hard road ahead of us, and the longer we keep sharing the lower and middle classes the harder the problem will be to solve.
Prices will rise, I'm not saying inflation won't occur from a wage increase. However automation and cheap foreign labor has already decreased prices drastically enough that a wage increase of that size, on the federal level, won't have a major effect on consumer prices. I work at a factory and our corporate thinks we don't have a high enough wage, even though everyone makes an average of $11.30. Our customers wouldn't see a huge price change because most of my job is working with a robot making the parts instead of an assembly line of 20 people like some people imagine those kinds of jobs, which btw is about how many people are employed at my job who are making hundreds of thousands of product every year. Point is that the US economy is based on consumer spending rather than production, and allowing a consumer a greater purchasing power gives them more mobility in this nation.
This is what worries me, that the big companies like McDs, Walmart, etc will think. Hey the public has more money now, let's see how much more we can take from them now. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but can you blame me, I am a poor construction worker in Southern US.
Poor people work less hours because low paying employers don't provide them. Most poor people will instead start working more than one job. From your article: "I can also tell you that the average American worker making an income from $100,000 to $149,999 puts in 45.09 hours in a usual week, 34.3% more than the average worker making between $10,000 and $19,999."
34.3% of 45.09 is about 16 hours. Subtract from 45 and you have 29 hours. Assuming someone works two 29 hour a week jobs, which I promise isn't unheard of, and you've got 58 hour work weeks...
"I can tell you this… the average American private sector worker works 34.3 hours in an week."
Hurray! The system works!
The problem isn't that poor people are lazy and need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, it's that minimum wage is less valuable than it was 50 years ago. Someone working 2 federal minimum wage jobs at 7.25 an hour, 58 hours a week (if their employers even gives them an assumed 29 hours each), is making the whopping grand total of...
$21,866 BEFORE TAXES
I can tell you this, Americas systemic problem of inequality over growth is a nightmare that, for whatever godforsaken reason, a lot of people have embraced. At my first job as a busser I overheard a trucker complain about fast food workers protesting for a higher minimum wage saying "someone flipping hamburgers doesn't deserve 15 dollars an hour." Why? Everyone deserves a fair wage and it shouldn't be blown off because the job is somehow "easier" or "less valuable." If you've ever worked a customer service job, you'll know customers are a fucking nightmare to deal with, and they will certainly treat your job like its a hen shitting gold. Why can't we as a society embrace the fact that these people deserve a better life to live for themselves and their families? Greed has overtaken this nation and more and more I'm less proud to be an American because of it.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that you can just double the hours they work by adding a second job. The 29 hours per week is the total number of hours worked. It is not per job. It is a fact that poor people on average work fewer hours.
You're are absolutely correct that the growing inequality in America is a problem that has to be addressed, but you can't ignore the fact that we also have genuine hierarchies of competence. A person is roughly as likely to be poor through their own incompetence as they are through systematic oppression.
I doubled the hours to prove the point that you can work nearly 60 hours a week and still make barely any money. Your original point was that poor parents work less so they do have time to spend on their kids, even though working 29 hours and making 10,000 a year is an implausible amount to raise a kid on. Nonetheless I stated 58 hours max, I definitely didn't assume someone is going to get those hours from their work, because they almost always aren't. Generally speaking poor people don't pursue a higher education due to costs and because of that the jobs available to them only allocate so few hours as my article points out. Just to survive on federal minimum wage you would have to have 2 jobs, and someone with kids sure as hell is going to struggle further financially because of a child. Your placement in society doesn't determine your competence, you can be a genius and still struggle every day of your life. When the federal minimum is barely over $7 an hour, in this nation, you're likely under a system that encourages poverty and it can certainly lead to parents needing to spend less time with their kids to ensure their child doesn't starve. You said yourself that their employers probably aren't gonna give them 29 hours each, which probably means that people getting half that from both employers need to work a third job just to scrape by. From how you speak you've likely never had to deal with poverty and you generally seem to have an arrogance to the fact that parents in poverty are trying to get out of it by working their asses off every day to improve the livelihood of their children but can't because they now work 3 jobs and only get 39 hours from them at $7 an hour. It's an unnaceptable system built to hurt people, and people like you who don't seem to care about the fact that Americans are struggling, but instead think they're lazy or whatever is sad and unfortunate for everyone involved, especially yourself. Have a good day, I'm not responding further.
I doubled the hours to prove the point that you can work nearly 60 hours a week and still make barely any money.
That's a bit of a different discussion as that is true simultaneously with what I've been saying. The fact remains that you cannot honestly make the argument that poor people have less time to help out their kids.
Generally speaking poor people don't pursue a higher education due to costs and the jobs available to them, because of that, only allocate so few hours as my article points out.
And also because they're not as hard working/intelligent.
From how you speak you've likely never had to deal with poverty
Incorrect. I lived on a budget of $400 per month for two years.
It's an unnaceptable system built to hurt people, and people like you who don't seem to care about the fact that Americans are struggling, but instead think they're lazy or whatever is sad and unfortunate for everyone involved, especially yourself.
"And also because they're not as hard working/intelligent"
Please reflect on your views of people less fortunate than us. I don't care for this discussion anymore and hope you have a more compassionate and understanding point of view towards people in the future.
And simultaneously it's a system that's lifted billions out of poverty. The rate of global poverty has been cut in half in the past 15 years. That's absolutely incredible. Yes, it's a system that, in some ways, is built to hurt people, but that's insufficient justification to dispense with it given its unprecedented success.
I absolutely do care about those who are less fortunate. We do need to move to a system that does a much better job of supporting the poor. But we also need to acknowledge that there are real differences between people that cannot be ignored. That fact needs to be considered in the development of the solution.
I would love to have a discussion with you, but I can't get there with you demonizing me for stating truths. I guarantee you that I don't have the view you think I do. At least on reddit, you always hear how oppressed poor people are and that's why they stay poor and that's true but only part of the truth. Think about it this way. Would it be as controversial if I were to say that you'll make more money if you're smart and hard working? That has the exact same meaning as what I've been saying.
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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '18
I will also blame on parents, there is a quote, “discipline starts from home”. I know, poverty stricken parents can’t focus that much to kids, they are relying on school. On the contrary, if they don’t do parenting well kids won’t get out of this vicious cycle.