Word: moton
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...across the U.S., kids are trooping back to school, but for youngsters at the Robert Russa Moton and Johnson C. Lockett elementary schools in New Orleans, summer ended on July 10. On that date, the 1,450 youngsters returned for the third year of an experimental program that adds 40 extra days to the usual 180-day school year. They were breaking a long-standing American tradition of summer vacations -- dating back to a time when family labor was vital to the late-summer harvest -- that give the U.S. one of the shortest school years in the industrialized world. There...
Increasingly, many of those critics urge that what is good for the kids at Moton and Lockett might be good for the entire U.S.: an extended academic year for everybody. The case for that radical change, says Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is "absolutely compelling." It also seems perfectly in keeping with President George Bush's highly touted goal of making U.S. students first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000 -- even though Bush did not mention lengthening the school year in the education plan he unveiled last...
...polling on the subject since 1958, found last week for the first time that a majority (51%) of its sample favored a longer year. "If I spend more time at the piano, I get better at it," argues Dwight McKenna, the New Orleans school-board member who initiated the Moton and Lockett experiment...
...inner cities, where family ties are weak, at-home support for education is often minimal and dropout rates are high. Summertime spent on the hot ghetto streets is hardly as culturally enriching as the time middle-class students devote to camps, exotic vacations and highly organized sports. Moton and Lockett, for example, are located near New Orleans' notorious Florida and Desire housing projects, where children sometimes skip rope within the sound of gunfire. "This has nothing to do with competition with the Japanese and everything to do with urban reality," says McKenna. "This is eight hours when the drug addicts...
...spoke of Leroy Moton. "The black man has no sense, morals, manners, courtesy, decency or anything when he sits up here on this stand and says 'yeah' and 'no in front of this honorable white judge ... He said, 'I passed out for 25 or 30 minutes.' What was he doing down there all that time...