Posted on 07/20/2011 5:08:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom's essay "Minorities in College -- Good News, But...," on Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores "mean that black students aged 17 do not read with any greater facility than whites who are four years younger and still in junior high. ... Exactly the same glaring gaps appear in NAEP's tests of basic mathematics skills." Thernstrom asked, "If we put a randomly-selected group of 100 eighth-graders and another of 100 twelfth-graders in a typical college, would we expect the first group to perform as well as the second?" In other words, is it reasonable to expect a college freshman of any race who has the equivalent of an eighth-grade education to compete successfully with those having a 12th-grade education?
Maybe this huge gap in black/white academic achievement was in the paternalistic minds of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals justices who recently struck down Michigan's ban on the use of race and sex as criteria for college admissions. The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U.S. Constitution. Given the black education disaster, racial preferences in college admissions will become a permanent feature, because given the status quo, blacks as a group will never make it into top colleges based upon academic merit.
The situation is worse than we thought. U.S. News & World Report (7/7/2011) came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal," saying that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, according to a scathing 413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal." The report says that more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated cheated on the 2009 standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress. Eighty-two teachers have confessed to erasing students' answers. A total of 178 educators, including 38 principals, many of whom are black, systematically fabricated test scores of struggling black students to cover up academic failure. The governor's report says that cheating orders came from the top and that widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001. So far, no Atlanta educator has been criminally charged, even though some of the cheating was brazen, such as teachers pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests, reading answers aloud during testing and seating low-achieving students next to high-achieving students to make cheating easier.
Teacher and principal exam cheating is not restricted to Atlanta; it's widespread. The Detroit Free Press and USA Today (3/8/2011) released an investigative report that found higher-than-average erasure rates on tests taken by students at 34 schools in and around Detroit in 2008 and 2009. Overall, their report "found 304 schools where experts say the gains on standardized tests in 2009-10 are so statistically improbable, they merit further investigation. Besides Michigan, the other states (where suspected cheating was found) were Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and California." A Dallas Morning News investigation reported finding high rates of test erasures in Texas. Six teachers and two principals were dismissed after cheating was uncovered.
In 2007, Baltimore's George Washington Elementary School was named a Blue Ribbon School after the number of students who passed state reading tests shot from 32 percent to nearly 100 percent in just four years. Last year, The Baltimore Sun reported thousands of erasures on those tests. Susan Burgess, the school's principal, had her professional license revoked after an investigation by state and city school board officials.
Why is there widespread cheating by America's educators? According to Diane Ravitch, who is the research professor of education at New York University, it's not teachers and principals who are to blame; it's the mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, enacted during the George W. Bush administration. In other words, the devil made them do it.
Even with the cheating, they still only mangage to graduate 30%-40% of the kids in these cities.
Bush did not make rotten dishonest people cheat. But the fact is that federal government interference, machinations and manipulations do have unintended consequences.
Williams is great; I would like for him to comment on the notion that many black youths view education as a “white” status symbol to be shunned.
Take away fatherless homes, the black/white chasm disappears.
“The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U.S. Constitution.”
I was in my senior year of high school when the courts ordered instant integration. Blacks were bussed in from a nearby school and dumped in our classes. If they were in an “advanced” class in their school they were put in the same advanced class in our school. It was a disaster. Advanced in the black school meant they didn’t cause problems. In each of these classes the curriculum slowed down to the lowest common denominator. We covered on average half the material we were scheduled to cover. All the students were short changed. This was the introduction of political correctness deciding what the curriculum would be and how fast a class could cover it.
The educational problem with blacks is cultural. If you ask them they’ll tell you learning “white stuff” is sucking up to “the man.” If a black student excels, he’ll get the crap beat out of him. A teacher stupidly complemented a black student for being the only one to get 100. He looked like he’d been smacked. Out in the hall he got the first beating of what I’m sure were several. He never passed anther test.
And what would the standardized test scores be if they could round up all the dropouts and have them take the tests with their age groups? As bad as the scores might be, only about 2/3 of an age group of kids are actually being tested, with the least prepared not even in the mix of senior high students and graduates.
the pursuit of excellent is raciest
therefore the pursuit of mediocrity is the national program.
IMO - the US will never regain a top educational position until the US Department of Education is gone and the various States take total control.
correction: should be “the pursuit of excellence”
Get your children out of the tax-funded, union-run, government school collectives now!
The very existence of compulsory government school collectives violates conservative principle.
Make the sacrifices necessary to educate your children at home, in church or synagogue schools, or in the private school of your choice.
Of our nine children still at home, eight are compulsory school-age children, and we educate them at home. We have made the necessary lifestyle modifications to survive on one income.
Get out of the government school collectives.
Starve the Beast.
Dirty little secret:
The far left have always viewed the blacks as cannon fodder for the leftist agenda.
What the left fears the most is an educated black person who has figured out the true racists(democrats), the true oppressors,(democrats), the true enablers(democrats) and the true believers of eugenics(democrats).
As long as blacks are kept dumb,on the dole, and seethe with white hatred, the left will use them as a battering ram to advance the cause and then eliminate them.
> therefore the pursuit of mediocrity is the national program.
The same will occur with collectivized government medical care.
As the Russians used to say when the Communists ruled, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
Ping
This is squarely on the shoulders of con men like jackson and sharpton who promulgate the notion that it is all whitey’s fault and the Africans are owed something for their ancestors being slaves.
And those that graduate will have an 8th grade education at best.
He also did not make stupid, incompetent, lazy, ideology-addled people incapable of teaching reading and arithmetic. He didn't force the schools to eliminate sensible discipline and proven-effective teaching method. *Every bit* of blame falls on school systems and their employees. EVERY BIT.
I wish Breitbart and O’keefe (and I’ll add Shapiro) would take on Big Education.
Don’t forget the judas goats like jesse jackson and al sharpton. They get paid to lead their people to the slaughter.
I am no fan of government schools and no fan of federal government meddling in the affairs of states or local school districts. Both are an abomination.
Didn’t figure you were ... I was just building on your comment to make it even stronger.
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