Colleen Kane has an excellent story in Chi Trib about high school athletes as non-academic.

One number won’t light up the high school scoreboard this school year: 1.0.

That’s the grade-point average on a 4.0 scale that a high school athlete could carry and still score for his or her team this fall, according to state standards.

Some schools require more than that. 

“To put out a team of athletes that are able to have five Ds and three Fs — that’s putting athletics before academics,” Evanston [HS] associate athletic director Dan Vosnos said.

Some do.

“Kids want to be involved in something. And the gangs don’t have a grade-point average,” Proviso East athletic director Andrew Johnson said.

It’s a common problem.

“To be honest, if many of the kids in our schools didn’t have something to look forward to — which in some cases is one or two sports — they wouldn’t come to school,” [nearby] Leyden athletic director Randy Conrad said.

Proviso’s Johnson tried to change things there, where the state’s minimum applies.

Within the last five years, Proviso East had a 2.0 GPA requirement, causing a stir among some parents and coaches. The administration changed back to the IHSA standard when it decided it was losing too many athletes.

“We had a 2.0, but we had no support,” Johnson said.

“Some parents and [some?] coaches” had their way, and so it goes.  Community standards prevail.  The school becomes a sort of anti-delinquency program, slipping back to a common (low) denominator.

A Fenger High neighbor who subs in city schools and whose wife taught there tells “Why they fight at Fenger” in a ChiTrib letter today, explaining at one point:

At Fenger, the Altgeld Gardens area is called “the dirty 130’s.” Altgeld students came to Fenger several years ago when Carver High School in the “Gardens” was changed to a military academy.

The conflict started when Altgeld students were sent to Fenger. This tension has been going on for a very long time. But every year, many of us noticed that the feuding escalated.

There were many times my wife expressed her concern about the tension among the students. There are always fights going on in the building.

He goes on to urge that adults “instill some moral and spiritual values in our children.”

But if they don’t, isn’t it better that kids go to school in their neighborhood, where they don’t run into outlanders?

This is the school and neighborhood where a kid was beaten to death with a board (not shot, as most South Side killings occur).  Wouldn’t it be a matter of common sense not to mix the two neighborhoods? 

But someone downtown — Arne Duncan before he followed Obama to Washington? — had the bright idea of making the Altgeld Gardens area school a selective military academy, and off the Altgeld kids went to Fenger.

If anyone has mentioned this specifically as an important aspect of the Fenger problem, I haven’t read about it.

Later: I better not assume you all know about the killing.  It’s here on videotape, if you can bear to look.

How is David Greising (D.-ChiTrib) like Rep. Danny Davis (D.-IL)? 

Give up? 

Neither considers cost of national health care relevant.

Delegate Greising, who has a column:

There are some who see the problems with programs in Maine and Massachusetts and argue that is the reason the federal government cannot afford to meddle in health care.

But with health care insurance premiums eating up 18 percent of the typical family’s income, en route toward a 24 percent bite in 10 years if nothing is done to “bend” the cost curve downward, it’s not a question of whether the federal government can afford to meddle in health care more than it already does.

We already know where Rep. Davis stands.  “No price is too high for quality health care,” he said in a townhall meeting at Malcolm X College on Aug. 22.

Greising has an explanation: The high-cost Maine and Massachusetts insurance programs “show that government intervention is better than no action at all,” because “[t]he only way to bend the cost curve is to adopt national efforts, while remembering the lessons of Maine.”

Which are that if you provide health insurance, you spend more than you thought and/or run out of money.

In Mass. costs doubled in two years.  In Maine the state ran out of money after enrolling only 10% of the previously not enrolled.

Like Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors,” Maine and Mass. want more.  Which in addition to her sense of civic responsibility may explain why Olympia Snowe voted the way she did.

Rep. Greising is all for “mandates,” as he puts it, in quotes.  Some object, but they merely

want minimal government and . . . apparently, are comfortable living in a country where people can “free ride” the system by not buying insurance, knowing all along that the taxpayers or hospitals will come to the rescue should they get terribly sick.

Apparently.

Here’s an amazing bit of Obama coverage you will never find in a U.S. sheet.  It’s in a blog at UK Telegraph, whose D.C.-based Toby Harnden got a presidential email on the day O. got the Nobel Prize — and two more since then, Nobel-dropping indicating he’s not “even faintly sheepish about the award.”

“Surprising and humbling” O. found the news, which he’d got that morning.

“To be honest,” he continued, saying he felt he didn’t deserve it (lie) and the others who got it had “inspired” him, etc. (another lie: nowhere near how Rev. Jeremiah Wright had done so).

“I’ve always thought that when someone starts a sentence with the words “to be honest . . .” it’s a signal they’re about to lie,” said Harnden parenthetically.

A few more “faux-humble paragraphs” and Harnden concluded:

Obama apparently sees the award of the prize as his biggest achievement so far, with the possible exception of his election victory. Well, it sure beats actually doing something.

“All in all,” Harnden found it “a hilarious display of vanity and self-absorption masquerading ineptly as humility and selflessness” and asked,

What does it say about Obama’s character when such an empty symbol means so much to him?

Too much, I fear.

And: Would be delinquent in my duty to humanity were I not to say Instapundit led me to this item.

Look out, old-timers, they’re coming after us:

To avoid “very ugly” fare hikes and service cuts on the Chicago Transit Authority system, Mayor Richard Daley said the Legislature needs to end free rides for senior citizens.

Ugly?  I’ll tell you what’s ugly.  It’s you, Daley.

“They have to revisit everything,” Daley said. “And that is one of ’em they have to revisit. Definitely.”

Why?  We’re old, we’re feeble, we’re crabby when we don’t get our own way, we’re more than you can handle, big guy.

The free-ride program was added to the 2008 CTA bailout by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and later was extended to low-income riders with disabilities, disabled veterans and military personnel. The CTA figures free rides will cost it about $60 million in 201.

He did the Democrat thing, and now some other Democrat’s going to take it away.  Look.  Blago embarrassed Dems because he was so obvious about it.

He spent public money to get votes, he gave favors for private money (his own).  OK, but he over did it!