Posted on 09/17/2023 7:58:24 AM PDT by karpov
America’s educational institutions used to adhere to objective standards of excellence. Students and faculty members had to strive and were rewarded (or not) according to their performance. What their background might be or where their ancestors lived didn’t matter.
That was true until a corrosive idea called “disparate impact” began taking hold in the country some 50 years ago. What that meant was that objective standards were objectionable if they resulted in poorer performance by certain racial groups. The obsession with disparate impact was kick-started by the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision and has been growing in destructive force ever since.
In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, Heather Mac Donald surveys the landscape and sees profound changes in crucial institutions: our schools and colleges, law-enforcement, medicine, and the fine arts. Everywhere, merit is being eroded due to the acceptance among “progressive” elites of what Mac Donald calls the bias fallacy—namely, that any underrepresentation or outcome disparities for blacks and Hispanics must be caused by bias against them.
Mac Donald rebuts that notion, writing, “The underrepresentation of blacks in many professions is the result of the unequal distribution of skills, not of bias. Sixty-six percent of black twelfth-graders nationally were ‘below basic’ in math skills in 2019, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam.” Without good math skills, many opportunities are foreclosed, no matter your race. Bias is a facile but utterly mistaken explanation.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
I call bull crap on the faculty being rewarded according to their performance. You have to go way, way back in time for that to be the case. Ever since teachers became unionized they received pay based on a union contract, not on their abilities or effort. If you want to fix education, you need to address the root causes. The unions need to be outlawed and anyone with an Ed degree should be banned from teaching.
We have so many “wake up calls” going right now it’s ridiculous, and no one wakes up. We’re headed for a giant crash.
One does not need to ignore the principle of free association to correct the disaster of national unions. All that is truly needed is to correct the NRLA to remove its protections against targeting unions for monopolistic behavior. That always was an abomination of "equal protection." Making unions competitve in the business of supplying skilled labor would accomplish many of the goals associated with school choice.
As to the "Ed degree," the biggest problem is the lack of accountability for accreditation of college degrees. IMO it would be better to demand an enforceable and insured guarantee from anyone granting certification.
You are full of it. Are you a teacher?
How erudite. Home schooled my kids while writing three books. They both self taught college calculus by the age of 12. Both earned PhDs in STEM fields at a young age.
A perfect example a a Sisyphean task performed by a Tumble Bug.
on most school district websites you can find a published pay scale.
Salary is established for years of experience as the only determining factor.
It is also predetermined what one's salary will be next year - whether you are Teacher of the year or you phoned it in every day.
merit - schmerit
I read recently about the high school ‘dropout mills.’ Instead of diploma mills, there are about 2,000 high schools that have most of the country’s dropouts. What JUMPED off the page was the fact that over half of the USA’s black high school students are stuck in these crap schools.
Makes me want to return to teaching. I would probably get fired for using regular pronouns, but it would be fun while it lasted. One of the particular joys of teaching struggling kids is showing them that they can learn. The look in the eyes of a child that just learned how to do something, when previously neither home nor school had supported them, is a joy I received more than a few times.
Here is a fun side note. At the start of every school year, I would encounter foul or unkind language in the classroom. I would state ‘If you can’t say something nice, just shut the front door.’ As I stated.. shut the f... the students’ eyes would get very wide, expecting foul language. We would discuss that language is a choice. Ahhh.. sugar.....oh, fudge. After a while, the students would state ‘teacher, some day you are going to slip’ (say a foul word). I would again remind them language is a choice. Eventually, some students would see me in the hallways at other times of the day and shout “hey Mr ****, shut the front door!”
Since intact minority families were destroyed by LBJ's "Great Society", they have suffered the results over the longer period.
What happens??? The answer is in what you are seeing in public school students today.
Please read the article. It’s about higher education—not K-12!
.....For example, Mac Donald quotes former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president L. Rafael Reif, who lamented that his school “has made little headway on racial equity and inclusion.” .....
Reif was a dud—who required MIT students to take a “DEI” class before they could enroll in second-semester courses! He’s from Venezuela—what do you expect? I hope that the new president of MIT will do better!
The new president of Harvard—the black studies expert Claudine Gay—should be a much bigger dud that Reif!
We need to bring back merit, excellence, and beauty to higher education, and dump the Marxists and race advocates down the drain!!
“All that is truly needed is to correct the NRLA to remove its protections against targeting unions for monopolistic behavior. “
Yep! If businesses are not allowed to be monopolies, neither should unions.
You d’Mom !!! - congrats on your kids !!!
We had two in our family, before all the estrangements that they caused.
The movie Stand and Deliver, about educator Jaime Escalante who taught ghetto kids to excel in mathematics really changed my thinking. It's criminal not to find ways to help these kids accept responsibility for their own futures, since many of their parents did not.
Now, the left just calls math "racist."
School choice can break the back of our sexual weirdo corrupt public school system. And it can do the same to the commie school teacher’s unions.
The problem with teacher unions is not NLRA monopoly protections but their cooption of the political process.
Public employees have no inherent right to workplace association. Even if they did, they should be subject to Hatch Act-type prohibitions against politicking individually and collectively.
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