Free Republic

"Comprehensive immigration reform" is a euphemism for amnesty. As such, reform will impose significant costs on the country. The primary effect of immigration amnesties in both the U.S. and Europe has been to attract more illegal immigration. An amnesty signals to potential border-crossers that if they can just get into the country illegally, they will eventually be given legal status. Illegal entries in the U.S. rose after the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986 went into effect and have increased fivefold from the 1980s to today. The vast majority of illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. since 1986...

Immigrants are making Germany 'dumber', according to a board member of the country's central bank. Thilo Sarrazin claimed the 'limited education' of immigrants - coupled with their high birth rate - meant Germans 'are becoming dumber in a simple way'. He said: 'There's a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.' It is not the first time the 65-year-old member of the Bundesbank has caused controversy since he joined last year. In October he described Muslim children as 'underclass' citizens. 'I don't have to accept someone who lives off a state they reject, doesn't properly take care...

In 1970, nine percent of California's population was comprised of immigrants; by 2008 it was 27 percent. A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that as a result of immigration, California now has the least-educated labor force of any state. Historically, California was not a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. However, immigration has transformed the state. Absent a change in immigration policy, other parts of the country may be transformed in a similar fashion. The report, "A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California," can be found...

The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850. But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering. The district said...

Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning: 2 + 2 = 5 NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ” For us New York parents the only surprise here is that any...

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard. This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments...

The Pew Hispanic Center released a sobering report this week reminding us about the bleak education outlook for the nation's largest minority group. The most worrisome stat? More than half of all foreign-born Latino adults in the U.S. are high school drop-outs. That's compared with 25 percent of native-born Hispanics. The implications of this trend are huge for a host of socio-economic reasons. But one of the most significant? It could lead to a more illiterate and ill-equipped workforce that's precisely what an information and technologically driven economy doesn't need.

Even as more local schools are reaching state targets on benchmark tests, nearly three-quarters of Los Angeles Unified schools fall among the state's lowest performing campuses, according to data released today by the California Department of Education. Today's release of the state's base Academic Performance Index, or API, ranks schools based on their statewide test scores and how they perform compared to schools with similar demographics. API scores range from 200 to 1,000 points with the target being 800 points. In the last year, 158 Los Angeles Unified schools reached or exceeded the state's target API score of 800, up...

As California's public schools have increasingly poured attention and resources into the state's struggling students, high academic learners - the so-called gifted students - have been getting the short shrift, a policy decision that some worry could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage. Critics see courses tailored for exceptional students as elitist and not much of an issue when compared with the vast number of students who are lagging grades behind their peers or dropping out of school. But a growing chorus of parents and advocates is asking the contentious question: What about the smart kids? "We have...

Concerned that its top academic schools are not racially and economically diverse enough, Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is proposing major changes in how students are admitted to them. The plan would take admissions decisions away from principals and their committees, and select students for magnet and citywide-admissions schools centrally, using a computerized system, according to a "draft" obtained by The Inquirer. District officials suggested a 1,000-point system, 600 points of which would be based on test scores and grades, according to the draft that was distributed to high school principals. Other factors would include behavior and attendance, and, for...

The percentage of Hispanic students who graduate from college in six years or less continues to lag behind that of white students, according to a new study of graduation figures at more than 600 colleges. In the study, the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit research organization, examined graduation rates for students who entered college in 1999, 2000 and 2001, and found that 51 percent of those identified as Hispanic earned bachelor’s degrees in six years or less, compared with 59 percent of white students. The researchers also found that Hispanic students trailed their white peers no matter how selective the...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that the Obama Administration will ramp up investigations of civil rights infractions in school districts, which might sound well and good. What it means in practice, however, is that his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will revert to the Clinton Administration policy of equating statistical disparity with discrimination, which is troubling. OCR oversees Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by race, color or national origin in public schools and colleges that receive federal funding. In a speech last week, Mr. Duncan said that "in the last decade"—that's short...

The federal government has singled out the Los Angeles Unified School District for its first major investigation under a reinvigorated Office for Civil Rights, officials said Tuesday. The focus of the probe, by an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, will be whether the nation's second-largest district provides adequate services to students learning English. Officials turned their attention to L.A. Unified because so many English learners fare poorly and because they make up about a third of district enrollment, more than 220,000 students. "This is about helping kids receive a good education, the education they deserve," said Russlynn Ali,...

On a late June day two years ago, two DeKalb County school administrators panicked. A few dozen of their elementary school students had just finished high-stakes summer retests — exams first taken in spring but not passed. With just a glance at the answer sheets, Atherton Elementary School Principal James Berry and Assistant Principal Doretha Alexander saw they were in trouble. “We cannot not make AYP,” Alexander said. Not making AYP, or adequate yearly progress, meant not meeting a required federal benchmark. These students, all fifth-graders, also faced being held back if they did not pass. “OK,” Berry answered. He...

Innate Superiority: An Inferior Idea Innate capacities do not matter so much as developed capabilities. Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities. Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early...

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek. Among the newer findings: • An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th...

Judge Cites Discrimination in N.Y. Fire Dept. By AL BAKER January 13, 2010 A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that New York City intentionally discriminated against black applicants to the Fire Department by continuing to use an exam that it had been told put them at a disadvantage. It was not a “one-time mistake or the product of benign neglect,” wrote the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. “It was a part of a pattern, practice and policy of intentional discrimination against black applicants that has deep historical antecedents and uniquely disabling effects.” A remedy will...

MIT must do a better job recruiting and retaining black and Hispanic faculty, who have a significantly more difficult time getting promoted than white and Asian colleagues, according to a frank internal study released today by the university. In some departments, such as chemistry, mathematics, and nuclear science and engineering, no minorities have been hired in the last two decades, according to the report, which was more than two years in the making. MIT's first comprehensive study of faculty racial diversity and the experiences of underrepresented minority professors highlights a national problem across academia: the need to improve the pipeline...

The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam, sources tell Fran Spielman. Dropping the exam would bolster minority hiring and avert legal battles, according to one source, while others confirm that the exam could be scrapped to open the process to as many people as possible. However, the lack of an exam would make Chicago the lone major city without one, and experts contend that the exam is integral to eliminating unqualified applicants. The CPD has tried in recent years to boost minority hiring by offering the police exam online and turning to minority clergy to...

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at...