The proposal is to create the school. We would construct the facilities. The main classroom teachers would be licensed in the state of Indiana and the curriculum would be the same as what is taught in Indiana schools. However, there would also be courses on Ghanaian history, language and culture.

America has a 200 year tradition of operating elite boarding schools. The problem, however, with public boarding schools is the cost. The facilities cost 25 million to build and the annual operating costs are $35,000 per student. This school would provide the students to attend the chance to have that elite boarding school experience at a cost that is no more than what public schools are paying right now. In addition, the students would have a great international educational experience.

The only group of people in the U.S. still legally subjected to Physical/Corporal Punishment in the 21st Century are children in schools in 20 states. It is ILLEGAL for school employees to hit children with WOODEN PADDLES to punish in schools in 30 states.

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.”

The TRUTH is that school children are treated differently in our great nation based on where they live. A middle school student in Texas DIED by having his chest crushed when his teacher sat on him to restrain him, a Texas high school student suffered deep bruising and welts to his lower back, buttocks and back of his legs when he received 21 “licks” with a wooden canoe paddle, which broke during the beating and had to be taped to continue the beating, a 9-year old Georgia 3rd grader suffered deep bruising injuries when he was paddled with a WOODEN PADDLE 3 TIMES IN ONE DAY (Decatur Co., GA affirmed Corporal Punishment Policy 9/17/09 for school children) and a Publicly Funded Charter School in Memphis, Tennessee physically punishes middle/high school boys and GIRLS weekly during a ceremony called “Chapel” by hitting them with wooden paddles and/or whipping their hands with leather straps IN FRONT OF ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS AS A DETERRENT to publicly induce shame, humiliation and fear! The school employees in the above actions have LEGAL IMMUNITY and are STILL paid by our tax-dollars to be ENTRUSTED with the care and education of our children!

A recent news headline reads, “Nearly 60,000 spankings in Miss. schools last year.” “Ouch! For the second time in a month, a school district in Leflore County has been hit with a $500,000 (each) lawsuit from a student alleging injuries from a paddling. It was reported that a state legal adviser, who told Bristol, Tennessee Director of Schools Gary Lilly that while school principals who paddled students were legally protected from allegations of assault, they were not immune from accusations of inappropriate or improper touching.

School boards are asking for trouble to sanction a practice that is intended to inflict pain.

Make no mistake: beating schoolchildren on their pelvic area with a wooden board causes more problems than it corrects — if it corrects any at all. Teacher-training programs do not include instruction in the “correct method” for hitting students. Zero tolerance for weapons and violence is the standard that should apply to everyone in educational settings. Teachers included

What corporal punishment does accomplish is to degrade the teaching profession, drive good people away, and make the teaching field a safe haven for the dangerously unfit. Its net effect on schools is a negative one. The more that schools indulge in paddling, the higher the dropout rate, along with all the social ills that follow, e.g., gang activity, addiction, mental health problems, unemployment, etc.

The time is long over due for our lawmakers and education policy makers to apply the zero-tolerance rule universally. When paddlers complain, as some inevitably will, they should be advised to look beyond their classroom walls and see how schoolchildren are managed violence free throughout the civilized world. They should look and learn from the 30 states where corporal punishment in schools is forbidden by law. If they can’t learn, they can’t teach.

U.S. Congress is currently holding hearings on Abusive and DEADLY practices in SCHOOLS and MUST ABOLISH Physical/Corporal Punishment Nationwide of ALL Children in ALL Schools, The Cost is $0.

This is incorrect. The people of Indiana and 21 other states allow corporal punishment in public schools. I realize it was not the main point of your post, but there is no federal law against school administrators physically punishing American children. Laws governing corporal punishment, be it by schools, parents, or anyone else, remain largely the province of the states.

There’s so much to get riled up about though.

It’s not just insulting to the kids themselves and to the entire nation of Ghana, it is also essentially the government offering (or insisting, I’m not sure which) to functionally revoke and assume parental rights. It may well be rotten parenting that is leading some kids astray, but why in this case does it seem acceptable for parents to relinquish–and the government to assume–what are basically parental rights and responsibilities?

But, you also ask “Are we arguing that their parents are so incompetent/neglectful/such a bad influence that responsibility for their care should be surrendered completely to the public schools?” I don’t think they are “arguing” that so much as they are acknowledging the obvious. Sadly, behind most at-risk kids, you’ll find parents (sorry: “a parent) that is unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibilities. Brown essentially wants to get these kids as far away from their families as possible. Hence all the “breaking the cycle” stuff.

Again, I don’t see why this couldn’t be accomplished in southern Indiana. But then again, *I* don’t want to be the one to go to the town hall meeting to inform those people that the state is sending a bunch of poor black youths to their community.

I would have no problem with an exchange program that allowed the best and brightest student from one nation to switch places with other thriving children half way across the world. Taking a child with a strong foundation of achievement out of his or her comfort zone and exposing them to a new culture will probably broaden his or her horizons– absent this foundation, I imagine you run the risk of just traumatizing them. Exiling failing kids on the theory that their self esteem will be boosted by looking down on kids living in a less economically developed nation? That’s just sick.

Are these kids failing solely because they’re currently being exposed to guns and drugs that don’t exist in Ghana? Or are they failing at least partially because of the very educational system (even one geared toward “Indiana educational standards”) that they are proposing be replicated in Ghana?

My guess is that there are some great schools in Ghana, and some terrible ones, each very differently run than the average American public school. It doesn’t sound like the intent here is to adopt the best parts of the Ghanaian educational system to “enrich the experience” of these American children. If the objective is to expose kids to a “different culture” how is that going to be achieved if schools are set up using the American model and enrollment is limited to American children?

For that matter, what’s in it for Ghana, and its children? The potential to look on as American kids (who may actually be further behind them academically) access the superior resources that their comparatively superior buying power affords them, before the American kids go on to compete in the American economy (from which these Ghanaian students are also excluded)? This plan at once “dumps” problem kids way, way out of earshot and insults and exploits their potential hosts. Don’t even get me started on the legal liability here, the cultural message these essentially segregated schools would send or the selection of an African nation to send these (predominantly black) kids to—over say India, or Portugal or rural Indiana for that matter.

Outrageous.