For the price of $65.00, starting in January, you will now be able to take a Los Angeles Gang Tour for Tourists. No joke… check out this article about it in the Los Angeles Times.

My first reaction was, these people are sick. And they are crazy. And they are looking to exploit inner city L.A. for profit.

And if they do that, it seems inevitable that this is going to end badly. And violently. And fast.

But after reading the article, and seeing how the founder of this enterprise wants to paint this as a human rights issue — and seeks to try and funnel whatever profits that may be had into the community in an attempt to revitalize some aspect of a sector of Los Angeles that is grossly suffering from dire economic hardship, I am not as skeptical.

I mean I am still skeptical, don’t get me wrong. Just not as skeptical.

But think about it for a moment, what is this tour exactly going to be? Is it a bunch of rich white folks who want to go slumming for an afternoon? Is it the international crowd, say a horde of Japanese or Argentinians who get picked up from a hotel in Beverly Hills and are then chauffeured in an air-conditioned gang bus past downtown to the southeast right through cities like Lynwood where I teach? (By the way, if I ever take the tour myself and see a student I know from my high school, am I supposed to wave, duck, or boast to all the other people on the bus, “Hey, I know that kid. He’s in my third period class!”)

Boy, wouldn’t I be the stud of the bus then?

Maybe the clientele is a a bunch of effete Frenchmen who once watched the movie Colors and like to play the hard beats of NWA over their Renault’s car stereo systems?

BTW, are gangs really going to grant “safe passage” through the hood for a brightly colored bus filled with tourists? I mean, isn’t one of the easiest criminal marks a crook could ever hope to target a tourist? Think about it, they don’t know their way around, some don’t even know the language, and they always travel with cash and expensive goodies because they have to pay for things like hotels, meals, and bus rides through inner-city gangland?

Oh yeah, am I the only troubled by the voyeuristic dehumanization aspect of this tour we might potentially be seeing here?

And for sixty-five bucks, what do I get? I mean is my driver packin’ heat? Like if they start shooting at us is someone on my bus gonna be shooting back at them?

Are there pit stops so that I can experience what it’s like to score drugs off the street?

Will I have the opportunity to write my name in graffiti on the side of a public building so that I can learn how to “tag”?

If I see a cop, should I flip him off, run, or drop to my knees and thank God that someone is about to save me from the Jurassic Park aspect of this stupid tour?

And if I don’t see any menacing looking homies who mad dogg me and make me think they are going to rip off my head and kill every member of my family, will there be some sort of refund? Like I wanna feel like I am going to die — but I am also hoping that the bus will serve lemonade, too… because as a tourist, it’s nice to have lemonade.

Oh yeah, can I get a tattoo to show that I am down for the hood? Just a henna though, please. My mom would kill me if she found out I used real ink.

For years I have said that while our attention is focused on an international war, our urban communities have been mired in a domestic war that is costing our citizens more of their lives, safety and sense of prosperity than anything going on in the middle east right now.

Truly, scores of kids die each year in urban America as a result of gang violence. As a teacher in L.A. and the author of the YA novel Homeboyz, I kinda feel I know what I am talking about to a small extent.

And now, you too can see what it’s like to live on the hard streets of gangland U.S.A. Don’t forget your camera — the trip promises lots of special photo opportunities.

Especially when you see the chalk outlines of 14 year olds. Those make for great stories once you get home and share your photo album with all your friends while sipping hot chocolate by the fireplace.

I tell ya, if it was white kids dying in America at the same rate of black and brown kids, lots of people would be singing a different tune about gangs in America.

And about tours that offer the chance to gawk.

I love sports. I love hoops, football, baseball, boxing, soccer, hockey, tennis and so on. And when I mean “and so on”, I mean, I can watch table tennis, badminton, lacrosse, rugby and golf.

Yep, I can watch golf.

But I only like to watch when there is level competition. If a game is a blowout, it’s off. If a team has a 35 point lead heading into the 4rth quarter, a 3 goal lead late into the second half, an 11 run lead in the bottom of the seventh, I am usually gone. Got other things to do and if I miss the comeback of the century I’ll catch the highlights on ESPN.

See, for me, there is no pleasure in watching sports when there is no element of a fair, heated competition between the players. If there is extreme competition though, the kind that calls on all opponents to reach deep down to give their best, I am all with it.

So, here’s an idea… what if we handicap our much discussed upcoming teacher/student/school evaluations like we do the game of golf? I mean we all realize that some schools have such a built in advantage before we ever tee up the school year that if we simply go head up (as we currently are), our score vs score comparison is going to make the competition a blowout.

So unexpected, too, right?

Almost without fail the upper-socioeconomic educational institutions in the U.S. are kicking butt and taking names. And despite the occasional “feel-good” anomaly (the kind which I strive to create in my own classroom), the low socio-economic schools are getting trounced.

But if we take into account mitigating factors such as English Language Learners, students living at or below the poverty level, degree of transience in the student body, special ed populations, and so on, suddenly there might be a way to really get a true glimpse into which teachers/schools/kids are really making strides.

Of course, from this point on, it’s all conjecture and academic with little need for me to draw up the “how we can do this” because, though I am no cynic, I see almost no way in the world whereby the parents who send their kids to schools like Beverly Hills High are ever going to allow a system of data to be implemented whereby the kids at inner-city schools like mine at Lynwood High will be able to actually outperform them.

Not when they pay those kind of property taxes, live in those kind of houses and support political candidates with those kind of fundraisers.

Nope, not a cynic… but not a naif either. Those parents would have heads a rollin’ if they saw their weighted test scores in the newspaper showing them to be getting whooped like a Greek mule on Crete during high tourist season.

Yet, to handicap the competition would level it out? Or would it?

See, now I don’t know. On one hand I think yep, applying a true growth model whereby we use baseline measures and then end-of-year evaluations to the data in order to show true achievement over the course of the year makes a lot of sense. But if we take mitigating factors like poor academic history, non-English speaking homes, lack of internet access, ability to hire private tutors to remediate under-performance, and so on into account (there’s gotta be a mathematic formula for this, right?) then, on one hand we are creating a level playing field whereby my kids can go up against any kids in the country. (And we’d LOVE to do that!) Yet, by handicapping our schools accordingly are we sending a mixed message?

Or even a wrong one?

Are we saying that “since you come from less, we expect less”?(And are therefore “lesser”?) See that troubles me deeply.

In my own class in Los Angeles, I tell my kids “no excuses” and we work to beat the metaphorical Beverly Hills High kids from day 1… cause I know that’s how the real world works.

But when I see my school get the “data” back from the state, I realize that to not take into account mitigating circumstances such as all the urban challenges we face, I realize, we’ve been set up for slaughter like a junior league baseball team taking on the New York Yankees.

Sure, the Yankees may give up a game now and then, but over the course of a season, the Yankees are gonna absolutely steamroll the junior leaguers time and time again.

And if I am the Yankees, I am not sure where the fun is in that. Yankees want to play the Red Sox. Ali wants to fight Frazier. The USC Trojans wants to kick Notre Dame’s butt… not Akron Community College’s butt.

At the end of the day, golf is ultimately a game you play against yourself and the course. You can only control what you can control — your own effort, preparation, practice time and so on. But if it rains, there’s wind, someone plays at 8 am when there’s no wind and another person tees off at 3:p.m. when a tsunami-like gusts are howling… what can you do?

You play the round that is on front of you. Some schools have kids where 98% of the parents went to college. And some have an 18% parent attended college ration… complicated by high truancy numbers and less resources cause there’s no real PTA out there raising a few hundred grand a year to make sure that the arts haven’t been killed off for their kids.

Yet the thing for all players to remember is, you gotta remember to love the game. Otherwise, you’ll never be the best you can.