The pregnancy trap

Teen girls keep having children, writes high school teacher Gerry Garibaldi, and we keep encouraging them

Teen pregnancy is an "intractable problem," says Gerry Garibaldi, that urban teachers "cannot spend or even teach [their] way out of."
(Image credit: Corbis)

IN MY SHORT time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama's Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the Feds, urban schools like mine are swimming in money. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

Here's my prediction: The money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children — all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

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