THE GROVES OF ACADEME – AT 8:09 A.M. ET:  This is a remarkable story.  It may even do something to redeem the badly tarnished image of the ACLU.  And it adds to the growing discussion in this country about our scandal-ridden education system.  Please read, from WaPo:

In the first case of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union is charging that the state of Michigan and a Detroit area school district have failed to adequately educate children, violating their “right to learn to read” under an obscure state law.

The ACLU class-action lawsuit, to be filed Thursday, says hundreds of students in the Highland Park School District are functionally illiterate.

Someone noticed? 

The complaint, to be filed in state court in Wayne County, is based on a 1993 state law that says if public school students are not proficient in reading, as determined by tests given in grades 4 and 7, they must be provided “special assistance” to bring them to grade level within a year.

But at Highland Park, a three-school district bordering Detroit, most of the struggling students are years behind grade level and never received the kind of assistance required by law, the ACLU said.

And...

One student in the Highland Park district, a 14-year-old boy named Quentin, just finished seventh grade. Quentin, whose mother asked that his last name be withheld, reads at a first-grade level, according to an expert hired by the ACLU.

When asked to compose a letter to Snyder to describe his school, Quentin misspelled his own name, writing, “My name is Quemtin . . . and you can make the school gooder by geting people that will do the jod that is pay for get a football tame for the kinds mybe a baksball tamoe get a other jamtacher for the school get a lot of tacher.”

COMMENT:  Incredible.  Just incredible.  And "civil rights" groups are worried about stop 'n frisk laws that have reduced crime. 

There is no note in the story about the racial composition of the district involved, but there are implications that it is at least mixed. 

These kids are being horribly cheated.  But it is wrong to blame only the school district.  What about parents?  What about so-called "leaders"?  This disgrace has gone on for decades, with little effective action taken.  In New York, in just the last day, the legendary police commissioner, Ray Kelly, has taken minority leaders to task for their indifference to the carnage within their communities.  Of course, he's been called a racist. 

As long ago as 1962, Harvard Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a distinguished senator from New York, warned that something horrible was happening to the black family in America.  He, too, was awarded the title "racist." 

We'll follow the ACLU suit.  Maybe they're doing something good for a change.  Maybe they can make up for the damage they did in New York City in the 1960s, when local ACLU operatives declared something called "community control of schools" a civil liberty, thereby helping to destroy the greatest urban school system in the United States. 

This is one chapter in what I believe is coming in America, a major national discussion of the vast corruption in our educational system, a discussion that will, for the first time, include a hard look at our fat, overpriced, and overrated universities.

July 12,  2012