Needed: a place where everyone knows your name. According to a new University of Chicago study of truancy and class cutting in Chicago public high schools, “More than 40 percent of the highest-achieving ninth graders missed two or more weeks of classes in at least one major subject in the second semester of 1996.” Study author and U. of C. professor Melissa Roderick says, “Cutting is easy in large high schools without adult monitoring, strong school cultures or orderly school environments.”
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“The state of Illinois does not want to spend any money to find out the cost of gambling,” says Chris Anderson, executive director of the Illinois Council on Problem and Compulsive Gambling, interviewed in “Poverty Issues…Dateline Illinois” (July 28). “The state operates with the same mentality of a compulsive gambler, only counting the win side of the equation and deliberately ignoring the loss side.”
What a deal! North-sider Monica Drane on her decision to stop teaching ninth grade to be home with her daughter: “I like to say I traded 97 14-year-olds for one baby” (Carleton Voice, Summer).
“For street gangs and organized crime groups, computer chips have become the dope of the 1990’s,” writes Elizabeth Van Ella in the Chicago Crime Commission’s “Action Alert” (Spring/Summer). “The computer chip is the most valuable commodity on the international market….Of the 80 million ‘486’ computer chips currently in use, fewer than 2% have serial numbers, a fact that has attracted organized crime groups. After all, it is not a crime to walk around with a suitcase full of central processing units.”
