Posted on 10/20/2011 7:07:33 AM PDT by Watchdog85
On a mission to narrow the academic achievement gap between minorities and whites, the Obama Administration has ordered the nation’s second-largest public school district to cut back on disciplining black students and develop a special curriculum for those who don’t speak English.
The orders come on the heels of a 19-month federal “civil rights investigation” that concludes the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has long failed to provide an equal education to the hundreds of thousands of minorities enrolled in its 730 campuses. How exactly? It’s anybody’s guess since the most transparent administration in history refuses to disclose details of the lengthy probe, which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
What we do know is that “English learners” and “African-Americans” are being cheated out of a quality education, according to Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan. So his agency is forcing the LAUSD to make sweeping changes because the systematic failure has resulted in huge academic disparities that have created a sort of civil rights crisis.
In fact, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, an open borders advocate, says the “achievement gap is the civil rights issue of our time.” He assures the agreement between the Department of Education and the LAUSD is a step in the right direction toward “ensuring that English learners and African-American students have equal access to the resources they need to graduate high school and get a solid footing on the economic ladder.”
Key among the administration’s demands is that the school district “eliminate inequitable and disproportionate discipline practices” for blacks and that it renews its focus on “identifying the academic English needs of African-American students.” The LAUSD must also implement a “first-of-its-kind pilot project for a community school in a predominantly African-American neighborhood” that will become a “sustainable and replicable model for promoting African-American student success.”
For the district’s 200,000 non English speakers, many of them illegal immigrants, the administration wants a costly English Learner Master Plan that will address the “specific needs” of each pupil. Students who reach high school without mastering English skills required to take college-prep courses will also get extra help and both non English speaking and black students will get “better teachers” as well as other resources.
No word on how the cash-strapped school district, notorious for its overcrowded campuses and monstrous dropout rate, will pay for all this. The state’s largest newspaper puts it mildly when it says the federal mandate “poses a potential financial problem” for a public school district that’s “faced multimillion-dollar budget cuts and layoffs over the last few years.”
That sounds fair to me! /sarc
Yea so now the African American and non-English speaking students are being told that it is alright to break rules or to cause trouble for other students being that the Obama administration has demanded that the schools had better cut back on any punishments for them.
The insanity of left-wing liberalism has no limits.
If you’re white and speak english, please move along.
I guess they’ll have to stand closer together, according to the title.
The Federal government needs to GET OUT of the classroom. What’s next? Blacks get leniency for criminal acts because they’re minorities? If Obama wants the disparity to diminish, he needs to start in the black community with the rap, violence, criminal and drug culture.
They can order all they want. But ya can’t squeeze blood from a turnip; ya can’t m ake the horse drink; and ya can’t educate kids who resist it as “acting white”.
Money down the tubes, but LA has brought it upon itself.
I wonder how many parents in these schools give a crap about their kids and their education. If they did, they’d be pulling them out instead of using the state’s de facto daycare system to “get them out of their hair” for 8 hours.
Seriously? Ugh. Just another reason to homeschool. I forget how many that is by now.
Because legislating equality of outcomes is.... moral? To say nothing of possible?
Someone wrote a novel in the 70's with this scenario in it. I understand that the name of the book cannot be mentioned on FR.
The LA Unified School District is 73% Hispanic, 11% black, and 9% white American as of the 1009-10 school year. Whites have already moved along.
It’s called “closing the gap between minorities while closing in on third-world status.”
Well, obviously, if the rate of “black” disciplinary cases is much higher than “white” disciplinary cases, it must be because the black kids are being singled out for discipline at a higher rate than their white counterparts. It couldn’t have anything to do with actual behavior.
The best way to solve this thorny problem is to just lower the bar.
So whites will be disciplined for walking while white and other minorities will get the first assault or shooting free...
This *should* be enough to turn CA ‘red.’ But it won’t. Hopefully, this Administration is gone before any such plan can be implemented.
Until Black people and Hispanic people WANT to learn (and that starts in the family), no government program will fix this “gap”. People like Arne Duncan are the real racists.
I feel sorry for the white kids who have to remain in the LA school district -- I would imagine the white kids are bullied & picked on & assulted on a daily basis. And I would especially imagine that any white teachers in the LA public school district are putting their lives in jeaprody every day that they show up for school.
The federal gubmint under 0dumb0 wants to dumb down the LA school district even worse than what it is already, thereby ensuring that entire generations of students will be uneducated & unqualified to hold any type of job.
What is even more ironic, Obama’s people students are getting their butts kicked in by Hispanic gangs who set up black free zones in neighborhoods and school yards. The school admin made up of primarily Hispanics will side with Hispanics in fights with blacks. Hispanics get detention and black students get suspended. Fights between the two groups occur on a daily basis in LA public schools, and blacks are getting the short end of the fight as teachers/admin who are made up majority Hispanic will side with their own. At least whites have the money and means to get out of LA but the poorer blacks are trapped.
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