You mention intelligence to choose a school that offers a pre-law program over one that DOESN'T? Actually, that is what we call a "no-brainer."

Imagine if ALL DISD high schools had the same APPLICATION and RESTRICTIONS of the magnet schools.

Let's see, well, there would be no "unschooled immigrants" or kids who can't speak fluent English, the trouble makers would be forever gone, the kids who fail would be gone, the kids with Down's syndrome would be gone, shall I go on?

Many of us who teach in DISD are products of DISD schools. Many remember when W T White was a premier class school, Skyline was THE school to get into, etc... Now, many of our own children go to Townview or Booker T, or we teach there.

Imagine if South Oak Cliff got rid of the second time ninth graders? Imagine if North Dallas HS refused to take kids who could not speak fluent English? Imagine if all the kids at Roosevelt had to take pre-law, pre-med or engineering, and they failed? Would they stay?

Any school that has a screening process will eliminate kids by design. The sad part is, when you have 22 or so high schools who do not have that priviledge, it is unfair to compare them.

And I don't know where you got your teaching credentials from, but ---uh, when many of us got ours, we were told that black kids do learn differently from others. "They work better in groups." We were told that most middle class children of any race will handle independent work more easily, because they have been taught basic skills at home, whereas many poor children were not. We were taught that children of Native Americans and even in some immigrant Hispanic families will have a lower word count vocabulary because their parents do not talk to them as much or as often....

Are their exceptions? Yes. Are there differences? Yes. That is the whole point. Education as a pedagogy has for the last 25 years been emphasizing the DIFFERNECES in kids, both between and within groups. Teachers are told to "individualize" instruction.

But we will be graded in a CEI as if they were interchangeable cogs in a machine.