"That just makes me want to puke all over your head, sir!"

Thinking about this puts me in a fiery rage: some jackass principal decided that the turbulent home-lives of some poorer students might be putting them at an unfair disadvantage, and that the solution should be to remove the advantage of parental involvement that other students have.

"...we don't know what the family life is like. We had a student, a girl who at 12 went home from school, took her siblings home and her mom was passed out on the floor.

"Her job was to make sure the younger ones didn't wake mom up. She had to feed them, she had to get them to bed, and the next day she's in detention because she didn't do her homework? That's where we are coming from with an inner-city school.

"We've got kids with a certain home life and we are making it worse by sending work home ... We have to accept the responsibility that we are perpetuating and extending the gap between the have and the have-nots."

Why stop there? Those kids with good parents still have an unfair advantage. I say, the school should start giving them beatings. Life is cruel and it's high time our school started teaching that to our kids. Give the teachers a bottle of tequila and have them go off on their kids. Break a few ribs, have fun! Physcially harming the children from good families is the only way to ensure that life treats everyone equally.

Nevermind that students learn more at home than at school:

...the growing consensus among researchers, on both the left and right, that the home environment, especially in the earliest years of a child's life, is crucial to future achievement. Cognitive ability is not an inherited trait. It can be taught—although increasingly researchers have found that it's taught not in schools (as most people assume) but in the home and during summer months, through middle-class parenting practices and attitudes. Schools can then build on this base, but they can't do it alone.

The Slate article that this quote is from is about an educator who actually has good ideas to back up his good intentions. His last name is Canada. Maybe we could import him and give him a job in Barrie.