Steven Singer writes his thoughts on Father’s Day, about the fathered lucky to have lobing children, about the children with no father, and about the children ripped from their fayhers’ arms at the border, while the rest of us watch in horror or silence, or even, with satisfaction.

Categories Education Reform, Love

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Charles says:

June 17, 2018 at 3:10 pm

This Father’s Day, I suggest that we all have a moment of silence, for the death of the Black family in the USA. Currently, 77% of all black children are born to unmarried women. see

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/77-black-births-to-single-moms-49-for-hispanic-immigrants

The traditional family, of a married man and woman, raising children, is almost extinct.

You can debate the cause(s), but the facts speak for themselves.

I weep for our nation.

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 5:54 pm
  
  Charles. Why am I certain you don’t care. If you do, join #BlackLivesMatter.
  
  Most of what you post here says grumpy old white man longing for the past
  
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  - Charles says:
    
    June 19, 2018 at 9:04 am
    
    You said:
    
    Q So why say that no one was aware of these problems? END Q
    
    I never said that no one was aware of the problems caused by fatherlessness, and the breakdown of the family, especially the utter collapse of the traditional black family.
    
    What I said was this:
    
    Q Politicians seem never to discuss the demise of the black family in this nation. It is a “taboo” topic. END Q
    
    And I stand on my statement. Politicians just do not seem to want to discuss the breakdown of the family. And they never discuss the demise of the black family. The Moynihan report was written during the Nixon administration, and mostly ignored.
    
    If a person brings up the subject, like I did, he is almost always called a “racist”.
    
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- dienne77 says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 7:41 pm
  
  This post is extremely racist, Chuck. Par for your course, I guess.
  
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  - Charles says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 9:51 am
    
    What is racist, about being depressed over the demise of the traditional family? Crime, despair, unemployment, poverty, drugs, racism, alcoholism, and a host of societal ills, have all worked together to clobber the black family in the USA.
    
    Fatherlessness, and the huge percentage of unmarried black females having children is a societal cataclysm. The children in these single-parent homes, have all kinds of problems and difficulties. Poor nutrition for the pregnant female. Underweight babies. More drug use by unmarried females than married pregnant women. More birth defects. Poor or non-existent pre-natal care. Insufficient nutrition in the critical early years, and thus lower brain development.
    
    More poor nutrition in single-parent homes. More chance of unemployment for the single women. Lower earnings ,and more poverty than in two-parent homes. Less supervision for the male children, and thus more chance of getting involved in gang activities and the criminal-justice system. The unsupervised girls get involved in sexual activity earlier, and are thus more disposed to out-of wedlock pregnancy.
    
    Children in single-parent homes are often less educated, and less able to obtain proper educations in the schools in their poverty-burdened communities. Children who do not have a father in the home, go to college at a lower rate than children in traditional families, and are thus more likely to live their lives in poverty.
    
    I have many faults, but racism is not one of them .
    
    Politicians seem never to discuss the demise of the black family in this nation. It is a “taboo” topic.
    
    See “Fatherless America” by David Blankenhorn
    
    and
    
    “Life without father” by David Popenoe
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 11:49 am
    
    Did you ever hear about the Moynihan Report? It was written in 1965. It was widely discussed. It has been reprinted often and is the subject of books.
    
    You should read it.
    
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  - Charles says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 12:01 pm
    
    I am well-aware of the Moynihan report. I have sent that link to several individuals, who are concerned about the breakdown in the nuclear family, and the resultant societal ills, that follow. I believe that the late senator from New York was prophetic.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 12:08 pm
    
    So why say that no one was aware of these problems?
    
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suelodgen says:

June 17, 2018 at 6:05 pm

I am again very surprised that you allow your messages to go out with typos. It does not enhance the credibility of your messages.

>

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- Duane E Swacker says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 6:12 pm
  
  Hey Sue what do you do when there is a dangling unexplained symbol in your posts? It doesn’t enhance the credibility of your message.
  
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  - retiredbutmissthekids says:
    
    June 17, 2018 at 11:58 pm
    
    Oh, Duane, you made me laugh yet again!
    You are too clever by half! (Actually, by whole–I still don’t understand that phrase: guess I’m as bad as those ESL “standardized” test graders described in Todd Farley’s “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.”)
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 7:31 am
    
    One of the best books about the testing industry ever.
    
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- dianeravitch says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 7:15 pm
  
  Why don’t you proofread for me? Let me know typos and I will fix them. You could be my staff. Ok?
  
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  - retiredbutmissthekids says:
    
    June 18, 2018 at 2:31 pm
    
    Love this comment, too, Diane!
    Ahhh…”sarcasm, the Devil’s weapon!”
    
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- LeftCoastTeacher says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 7:24 pm
  
  Ha! Do you know who you’re talking to? Oh, so sorry, do you know to whom you’re talking? Dr. Ravitch is not someone who just married into wealth and bought her way into think tanks and the U.S. Department of Education with no experience or knowledge, and therefore wound up making a fool of herself talking about shooting grizzly bears at school, or about historically black colleges and universities being pioneer schools of choice, or misspelling W.E.B. Du Bois in what was obviously not a typo. Not that our heroic savior of public education — and gracious host –needs or wants defending, but typos and ignorance are two different things.
  
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LeftCoastTeacher says:

June 17, 2018 at 7:30 pm

I want to wish Donald Trump a Father’s Day. Not Happy.

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stevenmsinger says:

June 17, 2018 at 8:45 pm

Thank you for posting this, Diane. I am absolutely beside myself about our governmental policy of separating parents and children who cross into this country illegally. I cannot believe we are doing this. I cannot believe that once it became common knowledge, we are still doing this. I cannot believe that ANYONE – regardless of political party – can justify this. It is one of the most appalling things our government has done in my lifetime.

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  June 17, 2018 at 10:11 pm
  
  I agree, Steven.
  
  Sometimes we recognize evil in retrospect, like the Japanese internment camps.
  
  Now we see evil before us, happening right now.
  
  Yesterday a Honduran woman was separated from her 8-year-old son, both of them crying. She was out on a flight to Honduras. Will she ever see her son again?
  
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retiredbutmissthekids says:

June 18, 2018 at 12:14 am

WHY was her son not sent on the plane with her, if the objective is to keep immigrants from entering this country? WHO are these miscreants who “are just following orders?”

Again (& I may have said this before) when I was in FL, I stayed over for a night at the (still operational) Krone Detention Center. There, I found out that our government was allowing buses to pick up men–in the middle of the night–to take them to work in other states (such as, for example, to pick peaches in GA). A Haitian-American citizen & I cooked up a plan to board one of these buses, cause a commotion (& this woman could speak to the people in their language, Creole, explaining what was happening to them), getting men off the buses, not taken away to G-d knows where.

Readers of this blog who are anyplace near where any of this is happening, try, if you are able, to do something. Come with large groups of people. I’m sure there will be officials w/guns; they had Cuban immigrants working at Krone when I was there, & the state head of one of the agencies (INS, I think; there were numerous {& ineffective} agencies involved in everything) actually came out, confronted me, & ordered me to leave the premises. I actually (not kidding or being dramatic) had armed Cuban immigrants (that’s how the state officials were “using” them) pointing their guns at me until I left.

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