College Futures in Jeopardy for Some Georgia Students

When we were contemplating a move to Thomasville, in south Georgia, in 1951 [that was three (3) years before Brown v. Board and also long before desegregation even began, a local businessman proudly told us that Thomasville had "one of the three (3) accredited high schools in Georgia. Considering Atlanta, Augusta, Athens and other university towns, many of which presumably had more than one high school, this was mind-blowing.

If a district had nine (9) mandates for correction from the regional accreditation agency, they had to have had at least a year's advance notice to cure these significant deficiencies.

1951 was the same year that my sister and I were both refused admission to the Washington, D.C., public school system because she had some mobility problems from polio and I had been born with a largely uncorrectable vision problem. We both graduated from high school and college with only minimal reasonable accommodations, she was an editor of a national magazine and a teacher, and I was a Natioanl Merit Scholarship finalist and a lawyer.

The school system at Greenville, Texas, the county seat of this county, about 75 miles northeast of Dallas, has been rated "unacceptable" under No Child Left Behind for five straight years, and has now been ordered to take some remedial actions, but it still has its accreditation. They sent me student trainees who, as seniors, had never been taught to alphabetize, much less write a simple business letter or balance a check book, so I had to train them--and a lot of those were the good ones who I hired. Now do you really wonder why one asked me "You can't get pregnant the first time, can you?" and, until I found out and warned her, another had accepted a date from an older client of mine she did not know was on probation for burglary with intent to commit rape and facing revocation for another similar crime.

The salutatorian, second in her class, at another nearby school district was admitted and received a scholarship to the second-tier state univeristy here--where one in four juniors could not pass the requjired Junior level Essay exam the first time they tried at that time--but had to be put into remedial English and remediaal math there. When her parents sought legal advice about suing the school district for this educational malpractice, fraud, etc., on her behalf, they discovered that sovereign and official immunity would bar any such legal accountability.

I went through grade school, and my older siblings high school, in east Texas, and the rest of our publicv education in Pennsylvania, etc., about fifty years ago. It wasn't like this then. I see gross grammatical errors, like "to not go," even in the New York Times and other reputable publications, one of which I shall not mention here, and political communicationx, from supporters of both presidential candidates, riddled with errors. I find myself working with one federal court opinion, apparently taken largely from documents filed by lawers for the State Bar, that speaks of absolute diwqualification of an applicant who, and because he, "either has, or ever had, or been treated for, or diagnosed with" certain conditions, without the federal judge or any of the lawyers realizing the logical and mecical absurdity of basing a decision upon the fact that someone has allegedly been "treated for" a condition with which he has never been "diagnosed," much less ever had. The sixth grade teacher who taught me most of what I was ever actually taught about writing, much less my famous law professor and first-year legal writing advisor, would have flunked me and hooted me out of town for that kind of logic and writing.

Peter S. Chamberlain of TX 9:15AM September 06, 2008

Aside from this being a poorly researched article, it also uses incorrect English.

If you're tired of something happening, you're "weary" of it. If you're afraid of something happening, you're "leery" of it. Clayton County is not tired of losing state funding; it's afraid of losing state funding.

What is up with USN&WR?

Rod of WA 12:36PM September 05, 2008

Yes, it's a disgrace, and I feel very badly for the kids.

But I'm not convinced no one saw it coming! This sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. I'm quite sure the school district has had plenty of warnings. Flunking eight of nine criteria - come on!

Lisa of MD 11:00AM September 05, 2008

This is a disgrace. NO one saw this coming?! I feel so bad for those kids.

Dana of NY 10:04AM September 05, 2008