Here a portion of a story yesterday by columnist Robert Koehler at the Chicago Tribune:
"I found myself running down the hall all the time because of fights," Rhonda Richetta told me, speaking of her early days as principal of Baltimore's City Springs School, a K-8 school in a tough inner-city neighborhood. "I would look at kids' faces. Everyone looked angry, like they didn't want to be here -- adults and children both."
In poverty-wracked neighborhoods, this is the American school system. "Education" takes place in a context of anger, violence, intimidation and arrest. The kids are struggling not to learn but "just to survive," as Ted Wachtel, founder and
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