There is apparently a movie out I now want to see called "The Boys of Baraka". I read about it on Ebert's site, which all movie geeks should go to weekly as all Muslims should go to mecca.
In the movie they send 20 at risk kids from Baltimore City to a school in Africa, and they do better there.
Think about that for a second.
I'm a Juvenile Probation Officer by trade, so I have some thoughts on this below the cut
The biggest lesson you learn in my line of work is that 90% to 95% of the kids I work with, specifically felony level or cronic misdeameanor youth offenders, do really well when you remove them from their home. Sure, there are the about 1 in 50 who are either severely mentally ill, low functioning, or to far gone that nothing works, but if you consider I'm working with probably less that 5% of the worst behaved kids in our society and only maybe 2% of those are irredeemable, what does that tell you?
They can be brought back. They can be made useful and productive. The programs exist to do it, we simply lack both the motivation, and more importantly the courage, to do it.
I'm telling you, most of my parents, particularly the worst of them, would send their kids voluntarily to residential boarding school programs. Many if not most ask if they exist right off the bat. But instead schools have no recourse but to send behavior problems home on suspension, or put them in segregated classes with other behavior problems, where they do nothing, learn nothing, and have no little or no consequences at home.
You can bitch about that all you want about what the parents should do, and how if they did we wouldn't have this problem, but that won't change those parents, and so we won't change those kids. We can say the state shouldn't have to be parents, and we would be right in saying so, but that doesn't make it go away. It doesn't raise these children to be able to be successful. It doesn't allow us to utilize these wasted resources.
If you take nothing else from this post, take this: These kids aren't stupid, they are uneducated in the ways of decent society and fluent in the ways of antisocial behavior.
The most frustrating part of my job is to see a kid in placement getting good grades, sometimes catching up as many as 3 grade levels in 6 months in a structured placement, saying yes sir, no sir, thank you, setting goals...and then watching them go back to shit when they come home.
We need to make this investment. We need to set up more residential schools for youth with behavioral problems. This needs to be the consequence kids fear, and if you have this you will give schools a tool they can actually use. You want to know why my clients never mess with me? Two reasons, one I earn their respect, and should that fail they know I have the power to remove them from their homes. That is called incentive.
I can hear it now about cost and about parental rights. Yes, it will cost a lot, but less than this war in Iraq, and with a hell of a lot greater pay off. And I'm telling you that most of my parents would sign paperwork to send the kids voluntarily if they thought it might work.
I'm not saying year round, just for the school year. Sure they will come back in the summer and on holidays, but believe it or not I don't see that as a problem. The kids will know that if they push the limit to much they go to boarding school, same as spoiled rich kids, and the ones that are able to will settle down, and we will save money on social services down the line.
But we won't do it, in part because of fear of litigation which we have the power to address since, um, the government writes the laws. But we won't address these issues, and so kids who go to a third world country get a better education and have a better chance than the same boys who grow up in Baltimore city, land of the 76% drop out rate. Maybe we deserve to go the way of Rome.