TEXT 10. Inner City Kids Keen to Do Well

School report paints optimistic picture of learning against the odds

Black inner-city children feel they face a harder time at school but are prepared to battle it out to im­prove themselves, a report reveals.

Many black children felt they were treated poorly by teachers and education chiefs, not only be­cause of their colour, but also be­cause of the area or even the es­tate they lived in, according to a study of children at 34 secondary schools based in east London, south London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Mersey- side.

But Catherine Shaw, author of the report Changing Lives, poin­ted out: 'Young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds value education very highly. They recognise its importance to their future chances. This, together with the limited job opportunities now available to school leavers, means that most 16-year-olds are now opting to stay on at school or college after their compulsory education has finished.'

Over 40 per cent of the black children interviewed felt they had been unfairly treated because of their colour. And up to 18 per cent of the girls interviewed said they thought they were given a raw deal because of their sex - and the highest proportion of girls in that group were black.

Black boys, however, com­plained more of being treated un­fairly because of their colour than did black girls.

The Policy Studies Institute re­port also concluded: 'Young peo­ple of black, African, Caribbean and other black ethnic back­grounds were around four times as likely to have been excluded for at least a week when com­pared with all other ethnic groups put together. The exclusion rate for boys is twice that for girls.

But most children had good things to say about being at school and thought that it had something to offer or was useful in getting a job.

But not as many black children were as satisfied with school as white children. They were more likely to say it was a 'waste of time'. Ms Shaw said:”In contrast to the way in which inner-city kids are often portrayed, we found that the vast majority of 16-year-olds positively value school and education in general.”

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Notes:

against odds – вопреки сложностям, проблемам

they were given a raw deal – зд. с ними обходились несправедливо

TEXT 11. Saving Youth From Violence

“Mom, can I tell you something? I'm worried. All of the boys I grew up with are dead. I lie awake at night and think about it. What am I supposed to do?”

The question was from a thir­teen-year-old boy in New Orleans. His mother suddenly realized that, of a group of six-year-olds who had started school together seven years earlier, only her son was still living. All the others had met violent deaths.

Nearly one million adolescents between the ages of twelve and nineteen are victims of violent crimes each year, and this has been true at least since 1985. Teenagers are twice as likely to be assaulted as persons aged twenty and older. The rate and intensity of violence involving children and youths, moreover, has escalated dramati­cally, and much of it is accounted for by adolescents attacking others in their age group. Adoles­cent homicide rates have reached the highest levels in history.

In February 1993, seventeen-year-old Michael Ensley was shot dead in the hallway of a Reseda, California, high school, allegedly because he gave his assailant an offending look.

In Houston, two girls, aged fourteen and sixteen, taking a shortcut home from a pool party, were raped and strangled by six teenage gang members, the young­est of them fourteen years old.

In a study of first and second graders in Washington, DC, the commission reported that 45 per­cent said they had witnessed muggings, 31 percent had wit­nessed shootings, and 39 percent had seen dead bodies.

On both sides of violence

Young people are both victims and perpetrators of violence. An alarming new phenomenon is the rise of violence among girls, often in complicity with violent boys. Girls increasingly join previously all-male gangs. All-girl gangs tend to be as violent as all-boy gangs.

The justice department esti­mates that of the one million young people who are raped, robbed, or assaulted each year many are the victims of their peers.

Much of the violent activity among teenagers takes place on school grounds. U.S. secretary of education Richard W. Riley has noted that each year about three million thefts and violent crimes occur on or near school campuses. That is about 16,000 incidents per school day. Violence at school is becoming almost as much a rural and suburban as an urban prob­lem.

Violence against girls and young women by males their age is another growing problem. Ado­lescent girls are particularly vul­nerable to date rape and acquaint­ance rape.

The threat of guns

Over all the concerns about ado­lescent violence hangs the threat of firearms. The psychological harm done to children and ado­lescents, either by the possession of guns or by fear of those who do possess them, is immense. The vision of guns distorts their be­haviour and their human rela­tions. The atmosphere around them is charged with the uncer­tainty of when shots may be fired.

They are confined to the safety of the home by their mothers, who caution them to stay away from windows lest they become injured by a stray bullet.

The median age of first-gun ownership in the United States is twelve-and-a-half years of age; often the gun is a gift from a father or other male relative. Chil­dren can buy handguns on street corners in many communities, and in part because of this ready availability of firearms, guns are involved in more than 75 percent of adolescent killings. Roughly one in ten teenagers between the ages of ten and nineteen has fired a gun at someone or been shot at, and about two in five say they know someone who has been killed or wounded by gunfire.

Gun violence is not just a prob­lem of inner-city poor children. Just as drugs have come to middle-class youth, so guns have migrated from the city to sub­urban areas.

In response, increasing num­bers of schools have resorted to metal detectors and other security measures; a few school districts even employ armed security guards.