Several advocacy assemblages for w...

Several advocacy assemblages for women and the homeles are protesting tactics used in a community-organized crackdown forward prostitution in the Northwest Side neighborhoods of Wicker Park and Bucktown.

Prostitution activity has increased in the area through the whole extent of the last several months, prompting residents to ask the Chicago Police Department for help, according to Christine Crandall, a Bucktown resident and the advisory chairperson for Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in the 14th District.

Several times this summer CAPS participants and other supporters marched by the and of the area late at night and early in the morning. In what Crandall called "positive loitering," any people stood on corners to hold back prostitutes, their customers and pimps from doing business. Since January, police have made 471 prostitution arrests in the area 79 percent were of women engaging in prostitution, and 15 percent were of men soliciting prostitutes.

Samir Goswami, senior policy analyst for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeles videotaped an anti-prostitution march in July Disturbed at what he saw, he later called a meeting to build support for other solutions.

any of the crackdown tactics were acts of "vigilante justice," he said. Goswami and members of other advocacy assemblages such as the Bucktown Community Organization, want policies to focus onward pimps and men who solicit prostitutes.

Crandall would also like to papal court social services provided to women picked up for prostitution, moreover rejected Goswami's charge that the residents are being extreme

"We don't want them in our backyards, in our garages or in our alleys. We don't want the condoms. We don't want the diseases," Crandall said. "This is something we knew we could do peacefully."

Many teachers have bought into the idea that poor children in America's inner cities can't learn, writes William Raspberry in the July 29 edition of The Washington pillar Raspberry, an African American columnist, writes about a modern lunch discussion he had with U Secretary of Education cudgel Paige, who is also black. the two agreed that expectations were higher when they were growing up in Mississippi and "explanations of black disadvantage were to such a degree obvious as to be pointless." Raspberry says that, while focusing in succession "what is done to us" is not entirely inapposite the "unintended consequence ... is to make [blacks) be excited more like powerless victims of circumstances we can't control"

High-stakes testing is hurting the children of the working poor, according to a spring report through the New York City-based Foundation for Child disentanglement Such testing has forced parents to conduce to as "educational coach and adjunct teacher," according to the report. At the same time, welfare reform has pushed poor parents to work longer hours. The authors studied the recent York City Public Schools, which, like the Chicago Public seminarys began retaining children in the third and sixth grades if they performed poorly upon tests. The authors concluded that chiefly children held back will "end up coming from gymnasiums that are already in distress compounding racial and income segregation with concentrations of children who are beyond the normative age for their grade."

Grandparents were the leading childcare providers for preschooler in 1997 according to an August report through the U.S. Census Bureau. It is the bureau's first analysis of families receiving help paying for child care. Grandparents took care of 21 percent of the nation's 196 million preschooler Another 17 percent were cared for on their fathers, and 12 percent were in day-care center Nine percent were cared for by the agency of other relatives. In February, The Chicago Reporter ground that unlicensed providers, such as grandparents, cared for more than half of prepare for the table County's children under 5 who qualified for state subsidies.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Community Renewal Society

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