Kudos to Obama (and Herbert) for drawing attention to this invisible tragedy.  One thing I know for sure: if our schools were doing a better job educating inner-city kids, this wouldn't be happening to such a degree.

 

Here are some scary statistics for you:

-         52% of males who fail to finish high school father a child out of wedlock

-         82% of America's prisoners are high school dropouts

-         80% of prison inmates are functionally illiterate

-         52% of African-American men who fail to finish high school end up in prison at some point in their lives

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July 17, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

A Voice Raised in Chicago

By BOB HERBERT

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/opinion/17herbert.html

Senator Barack Obama took his presidential campaign to Chicago Sunday, where he addressed an agonizing issue that has been largely overlooked by the national media — the murder of dozens of the city’s public school students since last September.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of worshipers at the Vernon Park Church of God, Mr. Obama, a resident of Chicago, said:

“I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that’s been robbing the city’s children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard.”