The Trump sign tweet wasn't photoshopped to make the joke -- it WAS the joke. If the street sign tweet was photoshopped it would have been to make the joke rather than a funny coincidence. See the difference?
These were not really “visual” tweets to me other than the Electric Ave sign (which I voted for) and the router one which I guess would be funny ( the router sitting there) except for the fact that I hate the sentiment. It reflects the kind of parenting I find icky. Really you feel the need to punish your teenager to “ make them” go somewhere with you. Or for being rude . Ugh. That’s not the relationship I wanted with my kids. I wasn’t into punishment like that ( making them pay you back for the ticket if they originally agreed to go is fine)
As for Dahl, I think you could have said “Dahl has repeatedly discussed on his podcast and in interviews the subject of his sobriety which he dates as beginning in June of 1995.” That would have conveyed that assertion without the whiff of doubt that even “ no reason to doubt him” has.
re Steve Dahl back-&-forth - credit to both EZ & Dahl for owning up to their mistakes. i enjoyed the heck out of steve & garry back in the day - laughed uncontrollably sometimes, in my car, by myself - definitely radio hall of fame material, IMNSHO. and while meier was funny, and a significant reason for the duo's radio success, he was definitely dahl's sidekick.
and dahl showed a degree of humility in the quotes/excerpts from his podcast episode - i doubt i'll listen to the whole thing, for context - that i hadn't expected.
i wonder if dahl is still a white sox fan. they've tested my patience these last 2 seasons.
Since you had a story on CPS and a response from Andy Shaw, I want to share this story. In 1977, I was a senior at Bogan High School on the far Southwest side. Andy Shaw was a political reporter sent to the school to cover a student boycott in opposition to bussing. I was 1 of 30 students out of a student body of 2000+ who showed up that day. There were more reporters than students on site. I felt that I got to pick which reporter I wanted to talk to. Years later I told Andy (on LinkedIn) that I didn’t talk to him because Channel 5 had sent a ‘hot’ female reporter and I was a 17 year old boy. He replied, “ouch”. But it is to his credit that I still remember him and his name, while the other reporter’s name has been forgotten for 45 years.
There is something going on here in the school debate that has always irritated me. People talk about the per pupil cost like it was holy writ in determining whether or not students per form well. I know it's important when talking available educational resources and quality teachers. But students know nothing about school costs. They get up and go to school. Some are more capable mentally than others. Some are raised differently at home and have different attitudes about behavior and schoolwork when they get to the building. Whatever is taught, they are supposed to learn. City schools are always compared with suburban schools in the debate. I spent most of my teaching career in rural schools. I worked in buildings that predated the Depression and were still using calculators when others were using computers. They still managed to produce students that performed highly on standardized tests, went to fine colleges- even Ivy League schools- and went on to successful careers. So maybe we should spend more time on the quality of students and their attitudes.
I see nothing wrong with “elite” public schools for high performing students. Just as we need to take care of poor performers, and special needs students, we need to provide for high performing students for whom our regular schools don’t provide enough challenge.
I lived in a state with schools of choice - you couldn't use it for parochial schools but you could choose a charter or a nearby public school in whose district you did not live (you provide your own transportation in that instance). The per-student state money followed the student. I looked into supposedly public charters for my neurodivergent son and was uniformly discouraged from even applying because they didn't want to provide the speech and occupational therapies and special education services he would need. One charter director came right out and said the state money that accompanies the student isn't enough to cover special ed services and enrolling my child would take away from their mission to educate the other students. In western Michigan, this has resulted in public schools having all the special ed students and charters having none. Strangely, most of those charters still don't have significantly better test scores than the public schools. Cross-district public school districts can also deny enrollment under schools of choice if they "don't have space" - but they decide on a case-by-case basis if they "have space" and somehow there's not much room for special needs students. So even public schools have some leeway in curating their student body there.
I am a subscriber and regular listener to the Steve Dahl podcast, and I'm glad he chose to respond to your story. He seems reluctant in general to respond to journalists about anything (especially "Disco Demolition"), so I hope you take his response to you as a sign of respect. And thank you for sharing that in TPS.
He was more than just "busy" last week. His wife Janet's sister passed away after a long, losing battle with dementia. They were in Detroit for visitation and funeral, and coincidentally again for a family wedding the following weekend.
During the week away, he posted "archive" broadcasts from the Steve & Garry era, pre-sobriety, including one episode where he came to the the radio station after an all-night bender. The difference in his character and tone compared to today is pretty drastic.
I did exactly what Stacy Davis Gates did. I sent my son to a Catholic high school. My primary motive was safety, secondary motives were control and agreement with its values.
I believe safety forms the foundation of getting a good education. You cannot teach nor can students learn in an atmosphere of violence.
No parent wants to send their kids to a dangerous school. Chicago has parts of its city that are dangerous where violence is common. They cannot control this violence. Schools located in these areas suffer from this violent environment. They spend lots of money trying to make this environment safe with poor results. They cannot police and teach.
Eric, you criticize private schools for eliminating difficult students. My Catholic school dealt with students that talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes. They expelled students who brought guns to school, who struck teachers and who dealt drugs.
Letting these students back into the school would threaten my son and his classmates and would pretty much shut down any learning.
Eric, where did you send your kid? Bet it was a safe environment.
I have met a fair number of teachers including some public school teachers who then taught at private schools. Safety was a primary reason for switching.
By the way, I generally find teachers to be dedicated, hardworking professionals.
You will have an education problem in public schools as long as you have a violence problem.
And while we try to solve this violence problem, parents will try to get their kids into a safe environment.
In a society that worships and protects guns, that glorifies violence in the media, that uses violence as a first response in solving problems - I do not have an answer to making public schools better except by leaving a dangerous school rather than solving its safety problem.
A big difference is that the parochial school has the *option* to get rid of students who "talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes . . . who brought guns to school, who struck teachers and who dealt drugs." Public schools don't have that option as children are entitled to a free public education through high school. They can ship troubled students to alternative school buildings or the courts can send them to a juvenile detention facility but that's really it. Schools just expelling problem students leaving them to their own devises isn't really a solution. Parochial schools can expel students without a worry because they know the public school system has to take the children. I truly believe the difference is involved parents - finding ways to help parents care about education and help them participate in their child's education, even if the parents are woefully undereducated themselves or hampered by the need to work 2 or 3 jobs just to keep their children housed and fed. Parochial school parents are already involved parents in that they have chosen to send to their children to parochial school, so those students have an advantage just in that.
I think you missed my point. The Catholic school did NOT expel the students who talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes. They worked with the parents to change this behavior and kept them in school.
They expelled students that struck teachers, brought guns to school or dealt drugs. Basically this was insuring that gangs did not run the school and teachers and students would be safe.
Expelling these students is an immediate solution for the school, the teachers and their students.
As for these expelled kids dealing drugs, beating up teachers, carrying guns and in many cases part of a violent gang- agree do not have a solution for them.It seems no one has a solution.
They commit violence, go into the criminal justice system and become career criminals.
But I had an immediate issue, keep my son safe, and eliminating the violent and dangerous students was the best solution. I am not going to risk my son’s safety.
The Catholic school had some very poor students who attended on scholarship. They were motivated to learn, worked hard with many getting to go on to college.
The school expelled wealthier kids who were violent.
And the Catholic school did not expel these students without a worry, they did it to protect everybody else. I find your use of “troubled student” rather glib. I am sympathic to troubled students, just not the violent ones.
So you have two problems, keeping your child safe and helping not troubled children but violent ones. What do you do? I chose keeping my child safe. It solved my immediate problem and the problem that required me to act as a responsible parent.
What about the violent kid, can we find a solution for him/her? Would be nice, do not have a solution. It seems no one has an easy solution for violence.
Delivery drivers aren't just on the clock, they're on the GPS-prescribed route. The carriers they work for, via drivers' supervisors, need to make clear that pulling to the curb is a required feature, not a penalty-related bug.
I have long felt that the main reason that private schools outperform public schools has a lot less to do with the quality of the teaching than it does with the selectivity of the private schools’ enrollment, and thus poses an apples to oranges comparison. Teacher’s unions might well be inadvertently thwarting attempts to improve the schools in the name catering to their own protectivist impulses, but the ability of private schools to skim the cream will always make the comparison invalid.
I think that Ms. Patt did an excellent job in her comment of pinpointing the real issues at hand here, but I think that her solutions, like those on both sides of this issue, are kind of naive and fail to grasp the gravitas of this crisis, and how we arrived here. The breakdown in our educational systems has tracked closely with the tectonic shift that has occurred in our culture over the last 60 years. The dissolution of the family unit, normalization of out of wedlock childbirth, absent fathers, divorce, diminishment in structured religious upbringing, and all of the social ills (mental illness, drug abuse, despair, crime, suicide, cyclical poverty, etc) that come flooding through in the wake of these changes all represent ground zero in identifying the crisis of our school systems. I think that it is very gullible to think that problems of this magnitude can be corrected with the Band Aid solutions that are offered. More nurses and social workers are not going to do the trick, but neither are gift certificates that can be cashed in at a parochial school. The absence of a familial structure in a child’s upbringing cannot be remedied with the divvying up of public funds, much as we might like to pretend that it can be. Recognizing our folly and reversing course from the destructive cultural changes that we have undertaken over the last few decades is really the only solution, although of course, I realize that we almost certainly won’t. Climate deniers have perfected the art of denying the reality of environmental catastrophe so as not to have to change their behaviors in any way to mitigate it. I suspect that the deniers of cultural and educational dissolution will do likewise.
There is no question that the dissolution of the traditional family unit plays a major role in our societal problems. Many, many studies over the past couple decades have affirmed that children born into and raised in single parent households are statistically much more likely to experience academic difficulty, do drugs and have criminal justice system engagement.
The Fatherhood Educational Institute published a statistical study reflecting that 72% of teenagers who committed a murder did not have a father in the home, 60% of all rapists were raised without a father and 70% of teenagers incarcerated did not have a present father growing up. So when we talk about disparate outcomes in education and with criminal justice disproportionately affecting the black community, you cannot avoid the direct correlation that almost three of four black babies today are born without a father in the home.
Further, the Brookings Institute published a study in 2014 on this subject that concluded in part, "Children raised by married
parents do better at school,
develop stronger cognitive and
noncognitive skills, are more
likely to go to college, earn more
and are more likely to go on to
form stable marriages
themselves."
It is not in any way racist to discuss these irrefutable facts. President Obama himself in a 2008 address at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago said the following, "We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves."
It is glaringly apparent that too effectively address the disparities in black educational outcomes and the disparities in black criminal justice system engagement a critical piece of the puzzle must be addressing the epidemic of black single parenthood. But very unfortunately, this is a discussion that is not publicly allowed by many of the same people who loudly decry the current situation.
I think the problem with those stats is kind of a chicken and egg situation. Is a broken home really the cause of those problems or is a broken home another one of the symptoms of abject poverty and the failure to invest in our communities. I betting if you adjusted for income levels those disparities go away. Lots of people in middle and higher income brackets without a father in the home probably don't have anywhere near the same level of dropout rates and engagement with the criminal justice system. I think you are looking at cause and effect backwards.
You're obviously correct. And all the scores of scientific method studies with representative sample all across the political spectrum from left to right and President Obama are terribly wrong about this. Our bad.
I come on and sometimes comment on Eric's page because, unlike most of the internet, I usually find the discourse here fairly respectful and intelligent. It's a shame you decided to lower it to this kind of snark and condescension.
There really are not "scores" of scientific studies that prove the point you're trying to make. (feel free to share a few) What you have is just a collection of data that shows correlation, and as all scientists know correlation does not equal causation. This correlation issue is why we have people claiming, wrongly, that vaccines cause autism. The rising divorce rate also correlates with the rise of cases of autism, would you claim divorce caused autism? There is little evidence that single family households are the cause of these issues rather than another result of the issues facing families of poverty.
This data has been used to attack same-sex couples as well, so most people that pull it out have an agenda.
I also don't think that having both sides of the political spectrum is an argument for you being right. Both sides of the political aisle also once agreed on the war on drugs and slavery.
I do think your defensiveness and snark are evidence of the weakness of your argument.
Deni - you are correct in that unfortunately I allowed the tone of my response to you to come across as snarky, and I owe you an apology in that regard.
But, there have been indeed scores of studies confirming the direct association of single parent homes and children having academic difficulties, doing drugs and getting involved in the criminal justice system. Here's a link to an article that references no fewer than 34 of them.
I don't think you can be intellectually honest and say that this incredibly strong correlation does not indicate a causal effect of one to the other.
With all the sex education provided in our schools and in fact condoms being distributed free of charge to students, there really is no excuse for the epidemic of single women and girls engaging in unprotected sex and creating children with men who have no intention of being a present father. And this is something that needs to be addressed, but since it occurs overwhelmingly in the black population, it is a discussion that is most often not allowed.
Again, I would respectfully argue that even the link you provided does not conclude the position you are claiming is definitive. That link also talks about scores of studies that find no relation, but you choose to ignore those results. In fact, I think what you promote as the evidence to support your conclusion proves my point, that the issue is much more complicated and nuance than you are willing to acknowledge. (Or that Obama is willing to acknowledge, and his comments were widely criticized) This is issue is much more complicated than "people should be married."
My point has been since the beginning of my response to your comment that it is much more likely that single parent homes in poor communities are the result of the conditions in those communities, not the cause of it. Those of you who argue about what this data proves about marriage and male responsibility ignore the factors of why there are so many single-mother households in poor communities. Black men are incarcerated and extremely high rates in this country as well as being victims of violence at higher rates. How is a black man supposed to stat at home and raise his children if he's dead or in prison.
And is a kid in these communities better off if a drug-dealing gang member father stays home to raise the kid?
As to your point about sex education and pregnancy among young omen and girls. First of all, teen pregnancy is at historical lows and has been going down for over thirty years, in fairly dramatic fashion.
I don't know if you have any kids, but I have a high schooler in CPS and I can tell you that sex ed is severely, severely lacking. I'd say it's criminal in it's awfulness. And CPS probably has a more forward thinking sex ed program than the vast majority of the country so I can only imagine how terrible it must be ("ladies, keep your legs shut until marriage and you'll be fine").
I agree that there are often other factors that have an effect on statistical analysis. Another related "chicken or the egg" statistic is that "9.5% of children living with two parents lived below the poverty level, compared to 31.7% of children living with a single parent."
As the daughter, niece, sibling, cousin, friend, great granddaughter, possibly granddaughter, and likely aunt of (I've got 17 nieces and nephews, so it's probable) of a couple dozen alcoholics some in recovery and some actively drinking, I think that Dahl may have let you off easy with that "reportedly." I'm glad you apologized/explained your reasoning.
Wwwhat? If that Jean Carroll sign on the side of Trump Tower isn’t photoshop, what is? Am I missing something?
I agree. But I also think it would have been funnier if it had been photoshopped to replace TFG's name with his booking number.
The Trump sign tweet wasn't photoshopped to make the joke -- it WAS the joke. If the street sign tweet was photoshopped it would have been to make the joke rather than a funny coincidence. See the difference?
That’s how I saw it.
I was hoping the sign would be replaced with a (smaller, more tasteful) Deutsche Bank sign after his unpaid loans got foreclosed... but of course the loans were mostly forgiven. Nothing fishy here. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/business/trump-chicago-taxes.html
These were not really “visual” tweets to me other than the Electric Ave sign (which I voted for) and the router one which I guess would be funny ( the router sitting there) except for the fact that I hate the sentiment. It reflects the kind of parenting I find icky. Really you feel the need to punish your teenager to “ make them” go somewhere with you. Or for being rude . Ugh. That’s not the relationship I wanted with my kids. I wasn’t into punishment like that ( making them pay you back for the ticket if they originally agreed to go is fine)
As for Dahl, I think you could have said “Dahl has repeatedly discussed on his podcast and in interviews the subject of his sobriety which he dates as beginning in June of 1995.” That would have conveyed that assertion without the whiff of doubt that even “ no reason to doubt him” has.
re Steve Dahl back-&-forth - credit to both EZ & Dahl for owning up to their mistakes. i enjoyed the heck out of steve & garry back in the day - laughed uncontrollably sometimes, in my car, by myself - definitely radio hall of fame material, IMNSHO. and while meier was funny, and a significant reason for the duo's radio success, he was definitely dahl's sidekick.
and dahl showed a degree of humility in the quotes/excerpts from his podcast episode - i doubt i'll listen to the whole thing, for context - that i hadn't expected.
i wonder if dahl is still a white sox fan. they've tested my patience these last 2 seasons.
Since you had a story on CPS and a response from Andy Shaw, I want to share this story. In 1977, I was a senior at Bogan High School on the far Southwest side. Andy Shaw was a political reporter sent to the school to cover a student boycott in opposition to bussing. I was 1 of 30 students out of a student body of 2000+ who showed up that day. There were more reporters than students on site. I felt that I got to pick which reporter I wanted to talk to. Years later I told Andy (on LinkedIn) that I didn’t talk to him because Channel 5 had sent a ‘hot’ female reporter and I was a 17 year old boy. He replied, “ouch”. But it is to his credit that I still remember him and his name, while the other reporter’s name has been forgotten for 45 years.
There is something going on here in the school debate that has always irritated me. People talk about the per pupil cost like it was holy writ in determining whether or not students per form well. I know it's important when talking available educational resources and quality teachers. But students know nothing about school costs. They get up and go to school. Some are more capable mentally than others. Some are raised differently at home and have different attitudes about behavior and schoolwork when they get to the building. Whatever is taught, they are supposed to learn. City schools are always compared with suburban schools in the debate. I spent most of my teaching career in rural schools. I worked in buildings that predated the Depression and were still using calculators when others were using computers. They still managed to produce students that performed highly on standardized tests, went to fine colleges- even Ivy League schools- and went on to successful careers. So maybe we should spend more time on the quality of students and their attitudes.
There is, however, a time for organ recitals. My dad used his when answering the phone to telemarketers who always began by saying, how are you today.
I see nothing wrong with “elite” public schools for high performing students. Just as we need to take care of poor performers, and special needs students, we need to provide for high performing students for whom our regular schools don’t provide enough challenge.
I lived in a state with schools of choice - you couldn't use it for parochial schools but you could choose a charter or a nearby public school in whose district you did not live (you provide your own transportation in that instance). The per-student state money followed the student. I looked into supposedly public charters for my neurodivergent son and was uniformly discouraged from even applying because they didn't want to provide the speech and occupational therapies and special education services he would need. One charter director came right out and said the state money that accompanies the student isn't enough to cover special ed services and enrolling my child would take away from their mission to educate the other students. In western Michigan, this has resulted in public schools having all the special ed students and charters having none. Strangely, most of those charters still don't have significantly better test scores than the public schools. Cross-district public school districts can also deny enrollment under schools of choice if they "don't have space" - but they decide on a case-by-case basis if they "have space" and somehow there's not much room for special needs students. So even public schools have some leeway in curating their student body there.
I am a subscriber and regular listener to the Steve Dahl podcast, and I'm glad he chose to respond to your story. He seems reluctant in general to respond to journalists about anything (especially "Disco Demolition"), so I hope you take his response to you as a sign of respect. And thank you for sharing that in TPS.
He was more than just "busy" last week. His wife Janet's sister passed away after a long, losing battle with dementia. They were in Detroit for visitation and funeral, and coincidentally again for a family wedding the following weekend.
During the week away, he posted "archive" broadcasts from the Steve & Garry era, pre-sobriety, including one episode where he came to the the radio station after an all-night bender. The difference in his character and tone compared to today is pretty drastic.
I did exactly what Stacy Davis Gates did. I sent my son to a Catholic high school. My primary motive was safety, secondary motives were control and agreement with its values.
I believe safety forms the foundation of getting a good education. You cannot teach nor can students learn in an atmosphere of violence.
No parent wants to send their kids to a dangerous school. Chicago has parts of its city that are dangerous where violence is common. They cannot control this violence. Schools located in these areas suffer from this violent environment. They spend lots of money trying to make this environment safe with poor results. They cannot police and teach.
Eric, you criticize private schools for eliminating difficult students. My Catholic school dealt with students that talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes. They expelled students who brought guns to school, who struck teachers and who dealt drugs.
Letting these students back into the school would threaten my son and his classmates and would pretty much shut down any learning.
Eric, where did you send your kid? Bet it was a safe environment.
I have met a fair number of teachers including some public school teachers who then taught at private schools. Safety was a primary reason for switching.
By the way, I generally find teachers to be dedicated, hardworking professionals.
You will have an education problem in public schools as long as you have a violence problem.
And while we try to solve this violence problem, parents will try to get their kids into a safe environment.
In a society that worships and protects guns, that glorifies violence in the media, that uses violence as a first response in solving problems - I do not have an answer to making public schools better except by leaving a dangerous school rather than solving its safety problem.
A big difference is that the parochial school has the *option* to get rid of students who "talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes . . . who brought guns to school, who struck teachers and who dealt drugs." Public schools don't have that option as children are entitled to a free public education through high school. They can ship troubled students to alternative school buildings or the courts can send them to a juvenile detention facility but that's really it. Schools just expelling problem students leaving them to their own devises isn't really a solution. Parochial schools can expel students without a worry because they know the public school system has to take the children. I truly believe the difference is involved parents - finding ways to help parents care about education and help them participate in their child's education, even if the parents are woefully undereducated themselves or hampered by the need to work 2 or 3 jobs just to keep their children housed and fed. Parochial school parents are already involved parents in that they have chosen to send to their children to parochial school, so those students have an advantage just in that.
I think you missed my point. The Catholic school did NOT expel the students who talked back to teachers, did not do their homework or cut classes. They worked with the parents to change this behavior and kept them in school.
They expelled students that struck teachers, brought guns to school or dealt drugs. Basically this was insuring that gangs did not run the school and teachers and students would be safe.
Expelling these students is an immediate solution for the school, the teachers and their students.
As for these expelled kids dealing drugs, beating up teachers, carrying guns and in many cases part of a violent gang- agree do not have a solution for them.It seems no one has a solution.
They commit violence, go into the criminal justice system and become career criminals.
But I had an immediate issue, keep my son safe, and eliminating the violent and dangerous students was the best solution. I am not going to risk my son’s safety.
The Catholic school had some very poor students who attended on scholarship. They were motivated to learn, worked hard with many getting to go on to college.
The school expelled wealthier kids who were violent.
And the Catholic school did not expel these students without a worry, they did it to protect everybody else. I find your use of “troubled student” rather glib. I am sympathic to troubled students, just not the violent ones.
So you have two problems, keeping your child safe and helping not troubled children but violent ones. What do you do? I chose keeping my child safe. It solved my immediate problem and the problem that required me to act as a responsible parent.
What about the violent kid, can we find a solution for him/her? Would be nice, do not have a solution. It seems no one has an easy solution for violence.
Delivery drivers aren't just on the clock, they're on the GPS-prescribed route. The carriers they work for, via drivers' supervisors, need to make clear that pulling to the curb is a required feature, not a penalty-related bug.
I have long felt that the main reason that private schools outperform public schools has a lot less to do with the quality of the teaching than it does with the selectivity of the private schools’ enrollment, and thus poses an apples to oranges comparison. Teacher’s unions might well be inadvertently thwarting attempts to improve the schools in the name catering to their own protectivist impulses, but the ability of private schools to skim the cream will always make the comparison invalid.
I think that Ms. Patt did an excellent job in her comment of pinpointing the real issues at hand here, but I think that her solutions, like those on both sides of this issue, are kind of naive and fail to grasp the gravitas of this crisis, and how we arrived here. The breakdown in our educational systems has tracked closely with the tectonic shift that has occurred in our culture over the last 60 years. The dissolution of the family unit, normalization of out of wedlock childbirth, absent fathers, divorce, diminishment in structured religious upbringing, and all of the social ills (mental illness, drug abuse, despair, crime, suicide, cyclical poverty, etc) that come flooding through in the wake of these changes all represent ground zero in identifying the crisis of our school systems. I think that it is very gullible to think that problems of this magnitude can be corrected with the Band Aid solutions that are offered. More nurses and social workers are not going to do the trick, but neither are gift certificates that can be cashed in at a parochial school. The absence of a familial structure in a child’s upbringing cannot be remedied with the divvying up of public funds, much as we might like to pretend that it can be. Recognizing our folly and reversing course from the destructive cultural changes that we have undertaken over the last few decades is really the only solution, although of course, I realize that we almost certainly won’t. Climate deniers have perfected the art of denying the reality of environmental catastrophe so as not to have to change their behaviors in any way to mitigate it. I suspect that the deniers of cultural and educational dissolution will do likewise.
There is no question that the dissolution of the traditional family unit plays a major role in our societal problems. Many, many studies over the past couple decades have affirmed that children born into and raised in single parent households are statistically much more likely to experience academic difficulty, do drugs and have criminal justice system engagement.
The Fatherhood Educational Institute published a statistical study reflecting that 72% of teenagers who committed a murder did not have a father in the home, 60% of all rapists were raised without a father and 70% of teenagers incarcerated did not have a present father growing up. So when we talk about disparate outcomes in education and with criminal justice disproportionately affecting the black community, you cannot avoid the direct correlation that almost three of four black babies today are born without a father in the home.
Further, the Brookings Institute published a study in 2014 on this subject that concluded in part, "Children raised by married
parents do better at school,
develop stronger cognitive and
noncognitive skills, are more
likely to go to college, earn more
and are more likely to go on to
form stable marriages
themselves."
It is not in any way racist to discuss these irrefutable facts. President Obama himself in a 2008 address at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago said the following, "We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves."
It is glaringly apparent that too effectively address the disparities in black educational outcomes and the disparities in black criminal justice system engagement a critical piece of the puzzle must be addressing the epidemic of black single parenthood. But very unfortunately, this is a discussion that is not publicly allowed by many of the same people who loudly decry the current situation.
I think the problem with those stats is kind of a chicken and egg situation. Is a broken home really the cause of those problems or is a broken home another one of the symptoms of abject poverty and the failure to invest in our communities. I betting if you adjusted for income levels those disparities go away. Lots of people in middle and higher income brackets without a father in the home probably don't have anywhere near the same level of dropout rates and engagement with the criminal justice system. I think you are looking at cause and effect backwards.
You're obviously correct. And all the scores of scientific method studies with representative sample all across the political spectrum from left to right and President Obama are terribly wrong about this. Our bad.
I come on and sometimes comment on Eric's page because, unlike most of the internet, I usually find the discourse here fairly respectful and intelligent. It's a shame you decided to lower it to this kind of snark and condescension.
There really are not "scores" of scientific studies that prove the point you're trying to make. (feel free to share a few) What you have is just a collection of data that shows correlation, and as all scientists know correlation does not equal causation. This correlation issue is why we have people claiming, wrongly, that vaccines cause autism. The rising divorce rate also correlates with the rise of cases of autism, would you claim divorce caused autism? There is little evidence that single family households are the cause of these issues rather than another result of the issues facing families of poverty.
This data has been used to attack same-sex couples as well, so most people that pull it out have an agenda.
I also don't think that having both sides of the political spectrum is an argument for you being right. Both sides of the political aisle also once agreed on the war on drugs and slavery.
I do think your defensiveness and snark are evidence of the weakness of your argument.
Deni - you are correct in that unfortunately I allowed the tone of my response to you to come across as snarky, and I owe you an apology in that regard.
But, there have been indeed scores of studies confirming the direct association of single parent homes and children having academic difficulties, doing drugs and getting involved in the criminal justice system. Here's a link to an article that references no fewer than 34 of them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1068316X.2020.1774589#:~:text=The%20assessment%20of%20the%20data,showed%20no%20statistically%20significant%20relation.
I don't think you can be intellectually honest and say that this incredibly strong correlation does not indicate a causal effect of one to the other.
With all the sex education provided in our schools and in fact condoms being distributed free of charge to students, there really is no excuse for the epidemic of single women and girls engaging in unprotected sex and creating children with men who have no intention of being a present father. And this is something that needs to be addressed, but since it occurs overwhelmingly in the black population, it is a discussion that is most often not allowed.
I appreciate the acknowledgement.
Again, I would respectfully argue that even the link you provided does not conclude the position you are claiming is definitive. That link also talks about scores of studies that find no relation, but you choose to ignore those results. In fact, I think what you promote as the evidence to support your conclusion proves my point, that the issue is much more complicated and nuance than you are willing to acknowledge. (Or that Obama is willing to acknowledge, and his comments were widely criticized) This is issue is much more complicated than "people should be married."
My point has been since the beginning of my response to your comment that it is much more likely that single parent homes in poor communities are the result of the conditions in those communities, not the cause of it. Those of you who argue about what this data proves about marriage and male responsibility ignore the factors of why there are so many single-mother households in poor communities. Black men are incarcerated and extremely high rates in this country as well as being victims of violence at higher rates. How is a black man supposed to stat at home and raise his children if he's dead or in prison.
And is a kid in these communities better off if a drug-dealing gang member father stays home to raise the kid?
As to your point about sex education and pregnancy among young omen and girls. First of all, teen pregnancy is at historical lows and has been going down for over thirty years, in fairly dramatic fashion.
I don't know if you have any kids, but I have a high schooler in CPS and I can tell you that sex ed is severely, severely lacking. I'd say it's criminal in it's awfulness. And CPS probably has a more forward thinking sex ed program than the vast majority of the country so I can only imagine how terrible it must be ("ladies, keep your legs shut until marriage and you'll be fine").
I agree that there are often other factors that have an effect on statistical analysis. Another related "chicken or the egg" statistic is that "9.5% of children living with two parents lived below the poverty level, compared to 31.7% of children living with a single parent."
Percent of funny visual tweets that aren't photoshopped: 0.
As the daughter, niece, sibling, cousin, friend, great granddaughter, possibly granddaughter, and likely aunt of (I've got 17 nieces and nephews, so it's probable) of a couple dozen alcoholics some in recovery and some actively drinking, I think that Dahl may have let you off easy with that "reportedly." I'm glad you apologized/explained your reasoning.