Failing Schools: Why not just nuke 'em?

I've been in New York for the last five days, so I have had to do my Route 66 mileage on the fly. I have managed to finish 36 miles (a rotten case of flu slowed me down) leaving around 95 miles until I reach Joplin. Nonetheless, I have been giving lots of thought to another of our nation's serious issues, Education in the United States, and offer the following ideas to the severely misguided, misinformed educational leadership of this country:
1. First, we must agree to throw out the notion that our schools are integrated. They're not. I do not have one white child in my third grade classroom, but the communities just a few miles south of the one in which I teach do not have any children named Jamal or Pedro.
2. Second, we must all accept the fact that the only really valid reason to subject children to standardized testing is so that real estate agents have the statistics they need to sell homes.

I'll have to finish this later. My plane is boarding.

I'm back at home, no problems with the flight, except for the fact that when you do the self check-in thing, they ask you if you want all of these upgrades, like, 6" of extra leg room for $39 and stuff like that. It's probably not long before we'll have to pay extra for seat cushions and oxygen masks.

More solutions for Education in the United States:

3. So-called failing schools need the tools to make up for what the children don't get from home, like their affluent peers:
A. Year-round school, and I don't mean three months on and one month off. I mean 44 weeks of school: Oct - Dec., two weeks off, Jan. - March, two weeks off, April - June, 2 weeks off, and, July - Sept., two weeks off. (Right now, the kids in my school are in session around 177 days or 35 weeks.) With my plan, they'd get another 9 weeks of school and not have the 3 month lag of summer during which they tend to forget everything. Teachers who don't like this should be invited to go pound sand.
B. Class size should be no more than 20 students. I don't give a f**k what research says, in schools with at-risk students, there should not be more than 20, and 15 would be ideal.
C. All kids in these so-called failing schools should be given breakfast and lunch, no questions asked, no lunch tickets, no frigging forms that parents have to fill out. For Christ's sake, feed these hungry children nourishing meals and stop dicking around with the paperwork.
D. Bring back God-damn Dick, Jane and Sally, or their multicultural counterparts. Our reading programs have become so ecclectic, basic learning-to-read books are not to be found. Kids are so confused.

These are the primary solutions I offer. Other ideas include: free English instruction for parents, field trips to museums, factories, historic sites, forests, nature preserves, businesses, plays, concerts, etc., all the kinds of places that poor kids never get to see, and art/physical education and music education on a regular basis.

We can afford to do these things, and we should be doing them.

I think I will have to lighten up tomorrow and tackle obesity.