Posted on 11/12/2014 5:28:51 AM PST by Kaslin
It would be unreasonable to expect a student with the reading, writing and computing abilities of an eighth-grader to do well in college. If such a student were admitted, his retention would require that the college create dumbed-downed or phantom courses. The University of North Carolina made this accommodation; many athletes were enrolled in phantom courses in the department of African and African-American studies. The discovery and resulting scandal are simply the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a much larger problem.
A UNC learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the years 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Eight to 10 percent read below a third-grade level. These were black high-school graduates, and their high-school diplomas were clearly fraudulent. How cruel is it for UNC to admit students who have little chance of academically competing on the same basis as its other students? Black students so ill-equipped run the risk of ridicule and reinforcing white stereotypes of black mental incompetence. If these students are to retain their athletic eligibility or minimum GPA requirements, universities must engage in academic fraud.
Academic fraud benefits the entire university community except the black students. If universities can maintain the scholar-athlete charade, they earn tens of millions of dollars in sports revenue. Other than as a pretense, academics can be ignored. The university just has to create academic slums, where weak students can "succeed." Stronger academic departments benefit because they do not have to compromise their standards and bear the burden of having to deal with weak students. Then there's that feather in the diversity hat upon which university administrators are fixated. I guarantee you that academic fraud is by no means unique to UNC. As such, it represents gross dereliction and dishonesty on the parts of university administrators and faculty members.
Unfortunately, and to the detriment of black people, there is broad support among black members of the academic community for practices that lead to academic fraud. In the wake of the UNC scandal, the Carolina Black Caucus -- a campus group of administrators, staff and faculty -- rushed to the defense of the black athletes and the department of African and African-American studies, claiming an unfair investigation and unfair public and media attack. One campus student group said that the student-athlete fraud scandal is actually a result of "white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism."
Focusing solely on the academic problems of blacks at the college level misses the point. It is virtually impossible to repair 12 years of rotten primary and secondary education in the space of four or five years of college. Proof of that is black student performance on postgraduate tests, such as the GRE, LSAT and MCAT. The black-white achievement gap on those tests is just as wide as it is on the SAT or ACT, which high schoolers take. That's evidence that primary and secondary education deficiencies have not been repaired during undergraduate years.
The academic achievement level for white students is nothing to write home about. Only 25 percent of white high-school graduates taking the 2011 ACT met its benchmarks for college readiness in all subjects for which it tests. Only 4 percent of black students were college-ready in all subjects, according to their scores on the ACT.
The high academic failure rate among blacks means one of two things. Either black students cannot learn or primary and secondary schools, parental choices, black student attitudes, and cultural values regarding education are not conducive to what young blacks need for academic excellence. Colleges admitting underperforming black students conceal, foster and perpetuate the educational damages done to these youngsters in their earlier education.
Academic fraud? This might open up a huge door. You might see thousands of cases, with damages put up against 200 major US colleges. It’d bankrupt them.
You mean Liberals have lied over the years about education because they think we’re too stupid?
I loved the part in Boyz N The Hood where the father is telling his son who has just taken the SAT test, “Most of those tests are culturally biased; the math is the only part that’s universal.” Also, the part where the USC interviewer is telling a potential football scholarship student that all he needs to do is score a 700 on the SAT test to get in.
I like Walter Williams, but it’s not bad schools. Asian kids who graduate from these exact same schools do just fine on the tests and at university.
It's also evidence that those students have such a high opinion of themselves, that they feel they are qualified to pursue graduate-level degrees while being able to read and write at a sub-high-school level.
Given that graduate programs will accept them (particularly education majors), this is more an issue for the schools than the students.
Not bad for 4th Grade reading ability. Or is this plagiarized from the slave owners?
It starts well before college.
Hubby taught both in the Navy (20 yrs) and JR. College (20 yrs) Computer Science, electronics and Math. All the kids out of the Memphis City schools who had A/B’s in math had to go through his REMEDIAL MATH in order to take his classes. While the foreign and county students did not. They were just handed grades in a dumb down system specially for minorities.
Strange the minorities in the county schools didn’t need to be dumb’d down. You get what you teach. And all they do now is teach to the state test. We find it with our 13 yr old grandson’s math Common Core, teacher jumps around so much with this Common Core which comes out of the Marxist movement, that they don’t have enough time to learn even. Most of the teacher’s don’t even understand Common Core themselves. They are only a step ahead of their students in knowledge of it.
Hubby who is a Math Major of the old school says Common Core is crap.
Asian kids are installed by their parents to exceed in school, black kids with few exceptions are looked down if they do
The teachers in elementary schools do not have to know much about math or language arts. They have interactive videos on Smartboards for teaching. The teacher is a facilitator. It is disturbing.
My first grader has brought home some interesting math homework lately. I could not explain how to do one of the assignments. I showed my oldest sons who are 18 and 19. They couldn’t explain it either. It is algebra for first graders. After much frustration we completed the assignment. I wrote the teacher and told her how crazy I thought the method was. She said that she told her students to answer the questions however they could. She did not care if they completed the lesson as presented. It would have been nice to know that before my son scribbled all over the page and grew his pencil. Lol.
I have spoken with a lot of parents and teachers about Common Core lessons. It is unanimous. Everyone hates it!
To appease Muslims, school district drops Christian, Jewish holidays from calendar
Montgomery County, Maryland parents, CAIR sought days off for Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/11/montgomery-county-school-board-strips-calendar-chr/
“I like Walter Williams, but it’s not bad schools. Asian kids who graduate from these exact same schools do just fine on the tests and at university.”
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Is that because the asian students learn more at school or because they get it at home after school?
Asian kids tend to have families that make sure they get educated. Many are effectively home schooled even as they attend public school. Part of it is insistence by parents that children learn the histories of the new country and the history of the old country. And parents insist that their children learn math, not what is being inculcated in school under that heading. Same with other subjects. If America must take in great numbers of poor people from other countries it would be actually beneficial were it limited to Southeast Asians and Hindus. Cubans are another group that has proved an asset to the nation.
Common Core is crap. My wife says so. She is a school teacher.She does special ed which is pretty much ignored by the system because everyone recognizes those kids as the dregs and doesn’t care what happens to them. She is thus able to actually teach real stuff to the ones capable of learning it. Some of her kids are the diagnosed ADDs and the like whose families refused to allow them to be drugged. After a year in Spec Ed many of them prove to be superior students but they are, of course, stuck with the SpecEd stigma that comes up if they apply to college or for many jobs.
All of the values clarification and sex ed classes got their perfection as they experimented on the inner city kids. When they spend so much time teaching the social issues that only leaves a little time for the hard stuff like math and science.
Common Core is the perfection of bad education as it ground through the inner cities.
Should anyone really wonder why black kids are so badly educated?
One more word. This is why Bill Ayers called the educational system "successful."
Common Core is the end product of the Progressive insistence that children are no different from adults other in that they have not so much knowledge. The truth that small children do not reason but absorb data- rote learning- wonderfully well is officially demeaning to children. For example, all the iterations of New Math dispense with rote and try to teach “strategies” for discovering solutions. Young minds are not wired yet for figuring out stuff. And when they are older and their minds have reached reasoning levels, they have no facts in their data banks with which to reason. A 4 year old memorizes jingles and entire commercials effortlessly without understanding. When he is 12 he does not memorize so well and, if a public school student other than Asian, struggles with math because he doesn’t automatically know that 9x7=63.
they learned it in African Studies.
They do teach rote memorization in public schools. However, they are cluttering brains with nonsense at the same time. I am not sure if the clutter is why there are a lot of students in fourth grade who still do not know their multiplication tables. Last year, third graders were not tested on multiplication facts until well into December if not later. This year, they are pushing multiplication facts earlier though they continue to test students on basic addition and subtraction facts via timed tests. The first graders are starting to focus on addition facts this week. The clutter is the problem!
I'm not sure I buy that. I think the usual 12 years worth of "learning" could easily be crammed into 4-5 years.
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