Nolan Finley Rocks Local Detroit High School With His Decision to Teach English to Sophomores

Response to Nolan Finley in "Test scores should rock Detroit's soul" in the Detroit News on December 10, 2009.

In recent and very open comments to columnists and to editorials a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit Public Schools (DPS) system.

It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.

Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion. Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.

When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive or obscene names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the developing social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine within themselves any desire to make better achievement.

It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.

What is the future work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school that remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?

When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.

Tell me how a man with great math ability (let' say recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?

There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.

Let's get Nolan Finley to take up the challenge. Let him get placed into one of "low achieving" high schools and let him teach English for an entire semester, then come out at the end of that time and report his significant, spectacular progress.


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