Then again, maybe it could not. Weasel words that is all.

"...The idea? An all-male charter school for sixth- through 12th-graders with longer days and longer school years than conventional schools, an International Baccalaureate program, and high expectations of students and teachers, including academic performance, the way they treat others, and the way they dress."

--ah, er, why not do that system wide right now!

Why the need to segregate, Kaleem? By calling for a segregated school, you admit that the group you want to help cannot "cut it" in the general societal system. Hey Kaleem, what happens when these kids get out of the segregated high school. Are you going to set up segregated Universities for them too? And then a special segregated micro-economy for them to live and work in after that?

Witness the new face of racism and sexism folks. And it is not mine.

When you get going, Reed, nothing, including yourself, stops you from going off the deep end.

Cool it with the bull!

The reason Madison schools have the problem being addressed here is that for too long people have not, "gone off the deep end" to call out charlatans.(Fountas, Pinnell, Brunner, Vgotsky and Clay included) For 30-40 years we've tried a mixture of mild-mannered edu-babble and forming special committees to look at the problem. It has not worked.
Time to live and play in Realsville for a while.
I'll cool it with the bull if you can let me know where anything I said was bull.

I might have to rethink my objections to Mr. Caire. I just noticed and listened to the interview he had with SIS. When asked, he said the biggest obstacle to helping young men and especially young men of color was the teachers union.
Still, there has to be a better way than separate schools.

I want to know if we're going to finally talk about how and why Wright Middle School has failed as part of this "courageous conversation" on Wednesday night.

"The fate of Madison Preparatory Academy will be a defining moment for our school climate."

Nice hyperbole. Even if Caire's gerrymandered faux private school succeeds beyond his national handlers' wildest expectations, only a handful of Madison's minority students will benefit. The rest (along with their caucasian cohorts) will still be gang banging and disrupting our middle and high schools.

The problems are not caused by unions, and cannot either be solved by supporting unions or crushing them. Unions have bargaining power over only three legs of a stool: Wages, benefits, working conditions. In whatever ways schools are successful or not successful, those reasons have absolutely nothing to do with wages, benefits and working conditions.

And don't try to tell me that the problem is giving teachers due process that prevents firing bad teachers. "Due process" is simply legal terminology for the same concept in science that requires a theory to be proved before being accepted. Lack of due process is nothing more than allowing someone the right to be arbitrary -- is it the teacher that is bad or the administrator or the system?

Carl Sagan in the his book Demon-Haunted World remarks that surveys show that 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate -- the same as the illiteracy rate of American slaves before the Civil War when it was illegal to teach slaves.

The reason why Caire's schools will fail is the same reason why no progress is being made in almost all serious problems in the US, including schools. People (adults, regardless of education) simply latch on to any idea or opinion that sounds good to them, that fits within their politics and belief systems, and push it like hell.

Parents, administrators, politicians, teachers are constantly whiplashed by pervasive garbage. There are thousands of dumb ass opinions out there for every one that might have something cogent to say. A population, 95% scientifically illiterate, simply will never find or understand that one cogent idea. We live in a society that is nothing more than a random opinion generator; what are the chances that we happen upon the opinion that is correct?