For the past eight years, I have helped train people who are becoming secondary school teachers, most in the public schools on the southside of Chicago. My job requires me to visit their assigned schools several times a semester and I can only say that what passes for public education on the city's southside is a disgrace.

As the anonymous writer notes, the high schools are more like prisons than schools, with metal detectors at all entrances and a heavy police and security presence. Outside the schools the threat to students from gang violence and other types of criminal behavior is very real. Not just at Fenger, but at many other Chicago high schools, students run something like a gauntlet to get to school. Even schoolbuses are unsafe.

When a student reaches school, he or she enters an environment that is antithetical to learning. At the beginning of class, it is not unusual for only about twenty percent of the assigned students to be in the classroom. Other students drift into class during the period, causing disruption and breaking the teacher's rhythm. Announcements blare over the loudspeaker, again disrupting the class. In some Chicago high school classrooms, eighteen-year-old or nineteen-year-old students attend along with students four or five years their junior. Special needs students are "mainstreamed" and their behavior often requires intervention. All-in-all, the classroom environment is appalling. In the hallways, school administrators try to maintain order, but it is impossible to control several hundred students with the three or four security personnel who are typically stationed on each floor of the building.

Despite these handicaps, there are thousands of students in Chicago public high schools who want to learn, who are eager to obtain the skills necessary to succeed, and who want to help change the educational culture. Do we consign these students to failure simply because they attend public school in the city of Chicago? Do we make glib and ignorant comments like "ghetto happens," always taking care in our daily lives to avoid any neighborhoods that look like they may be dangerous, or "scary?"

In my estimation, there are four parts to educating our children: 1) school administrations; 2) teachers; 3) parents; 4) students. In Chicago, three (sometimes four) or these parts are dysfunctional. The penultimate sentence in the letter from anonymous illustrates this clearly. The kids will have to "come to their senses" alone because they are seem not to be getting much guidance from the adults in their lives.

In his usual thoughtful manner, Cabdriver offers the anonymous letter writer an apology for the tenor of the comments on this thread. I would suggest we owe her an apology for turning our backs on the children who want to succeed. Why must the accident of someone's birth have to sentence them to a lifetime of crushed hopes and shattered dreams?