Who cares about the good kids?

They deserve more than this.

Let’s call him Zahir because that’s not his name.

Zahir wants to be an English teacher when he grows up. He is always polite. He does his work, in class, never cheats using Google or AI. He comes and gives me little hugs when he sees me. It took me a while to learn the spelling of his real name to write the bathroom pass, and he was very patient about it.

He is smart, has impulse control, and is articulate. There are a whole lot of you liberals who are trained to believe the word “articulate” is racist when used for a black person, but it’s a real thing. Most of his classmates can’t get out a sentence in proper English. I am not making light of it or too much of it. You come live the life I live and tell me what you see.

So Zahir wants to be an English teacher. He will need to take the SAT to get into college. He wants to go to Temple which has a great teaching program. He has wonderful, logical ambitions. This young man is the future.

I told him I teach SAT prep. I brought up some SAT questions on my laptop.

“Miss I don’t have any idea what this is talking about.”

No, of course he doesn’t. The SAT is hard. It proves that you are fluent in academic English, that you can read studies. It’s more science now than it was when I took it. My friends from college may be shocked at the new version.

If I had a semester with Zahir and a few of the best kids in the school, I could get their SAT verbal scores up to Ivy level. I know I could. Give me these kids for a semester, the driven ones, the motivated ones, and I will forever alter their life path. Colleges are falling over themselves to admit black kids from the hood but they can’t find qualified ones. I’ll make them.

But no. That idea would go nowhere. It sounds like a joke when I say it out loud.

Instead, tons of money and resources go to social workers, case managers, and one-on-ones for the worst kids. The ones with the behavior problems, the ones who just want to disrupt and don’t want to learn. I’m done with feeling sorry for them. They have problems and should get help, but they poison the school for the kids who are trying. Who care.

Our society had made a collective decision to reward bad behavior and punish the good. The kid who is the most disruptive gets the most attention. The kids who are good quietly shut down. Teachers don’t have time to give them the attention they deserve because we are too busy managing the kids who are a threat to themselves and others on a daily basis.

The good kids should matter more than the ones who are abjectly dysfunctional. But the system values the dysfunctional many times more. They get all the resources, all the excuses, all the time in the world. Only a small percentage of kids with IEPs can fail, else the school gets in trouble.

I have a solution. Controversial, but it would work:

Kick the bad kids out.

Get rid of the behavior problems. Send them to the schools that are more like military schools, where they can be re-parented because they obviously did not learn how to behave at home. Their iPhone addicted and likely drug addicted parents didn’t parent them so let the state do it if you love the state so much. Or send them to work. Get the disrupters away from the kids who have a chance, who want to become productive members of society.

I want Zahir to go to Temple, become an English teacher, learn to use the English language. I want him to write. I want him to marry a nice young lady and have his own children. I want to teach his children in middle school. Is that too much to ask?

But if things don’t change he won’t have a chance. Because the norms are so low, and the good kids don’t get any attention.

Someone has to fight for them. I’m looking around. I don’t see anyone else.

Guess it’s me.