3527 The importance of friends

Although it is important to raise a child in a home with married parents who have good values, by the time they get to about 11 or 12, we know from our own experience and various studies that their friends, the peers, take over in the "training and raising." I really enjoyed Hispanic Pundit's story about his two friends Edgar and Sid, his love for them, his respect and treatment of their parents, and his sadness about the turn in their lives. I was left wondering how HP came through that on the other side. I guess he'll have to tell more stories.

One of his readers left the following comment: "My "salvation" in the old neighborhood was to hang out with the Vietnamese immigrants: they all were going to college, so I went too."Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/poverty
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3332 My letter to Oprah

My husband suggested I turn on the Oprah show--she was doing a program on "class." I watched a few minutes (it was a rerun of an April show), but couldn't handle the twaddle of Robert Reich, Clinton's former Secretary of Labor. Her web site summarizes his thoughts:

Reich "says that a family's ability to provide their children with a quality education, health care and access to other resources determines one's class. "A lot of kids who are poor or working class are not getting the schools that they need and are not having the connections and the models of success that they need."

He notes three indicators of class: "weight, teeth and dialect. In terms of appearance, people who are overweight or have poor teeth are generally regarded as lower class."

I didn’t see the part about teeth but did hear him saying they (lower class and poor) aren't getting good schools. That's been proven false by putting lower class district children into stunning new schools with incredible technology. New bricks don't turn out new scholars. Old values and concerned parents do. Poor families who take the initiative to get their kids into charter schools benefit in the long run. Immigrant Vietnamese and other Asians and even some immigrant Mexicans have managed to move their families into the middle class by hard work and strong family values, not good teeth and good schools.

Here’s my letter to Oprah.


I was disappointed in your "class" show because of the misinformation Robert Reich presented.

The growing gap is not between classes, but between families of married couples and unmarried women with children. Women can virtually eliminate poverty by 1) finishing high school, 2) not having babies as teen-agers, and 3) marrying the father of their children. If her husband takes a job, any job and keeps it, he will almost guarantee their success.

There is still plenty of opportunity in this country--illegals who flood over our borders seeking it is proof of that. But young women need to get smart and stop listening to musicians and boyfriends who call them "Ho" and "bitch" and get down to the business of saving their future children with some backbone and pride.

Maybe you could also open a school for girls here in the U.S.



Source update: William Galston, a Democratic strategist and former domestic affairs adviser to President Clinton is usually acknowledged as the source of the statistics on the relationship between poverty, education and marriage. See James Q. Wilson, City Journal, Why we don't marry. The original Galston source doesn’t seem to be on-line, but every one quotes him. You can look through his bibliography--may be co-authored with Kamarck.

Source update: Kansas City--money and school performance, Cato Policy Analysis . "The lessons of the Kansas City experiment should stand as a warning to those who would use massive funding and gold-plated buildings to encourage integration and improve education."

Robert Reich
Oprah show
poverty
marriageSource URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/poverty
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3302 Fresh coffee

I've got some new posts over at Coffee Spills my blog about the people I meet and greet at coffee shops. Sometimes the stories I hear are just too sad or mystifying to repeat even at a blog among millions. If you've ever pondered why some people seem so mired in the quicksand of near-poverty, just listen a bit. After you've heard about the live-in boyfriend who only occasionally works, or the son who is developmentally challenged, or that she doesn't want a better job because it's all she can do to make it through the day now, or the surgery that probably isn't going to work (because he's so overweight)--well, it's really hard to gin up the indignation I read in the hard luck poverty stories in the paper. Or catch that conversation of the grandmother telling about her granddaughter's $55,000 wedding for a marriage that went sour after one year because he was an alcoholic. You realize even rich folks with good jobs and first class educations can botch up what should be a very good life.Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/search/label/poverty
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