Posted on 07/23/2008 4:36:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Hard Times at Douglass High," is an HBO documentary that aired last June. It captured much of the 2004-2005 school year at Baltimore's predominantly black Frederick Douglass High School. The tragedy is that what is seen in the documentary is typical of most predominantly black urban schools.
Douglass' students are four to five years below grade level. Most of its ninth-graders read at the third-, fourth- or fifth-grade levels. In 2006, only 24 percent of its students tested proficient in reading, in math just 11 percent, and that's an improvement over previous years. Only one student managed to score above 1,000 on the SAT and another student scored 440 out of 1,600. You get 400 points for just writing in your name. Out of its 1,100 students, 200 to 300 are absent each day. Many of those who do show up don't do so on time; they roam the hallways and leave the school during the day. Only one-half of the school's 500 incoming freshmen ninth-graders return for their sophomore year and far fewer remain for graduation
Sixty-six percent of the teachers are uncertified. Even if there were no certified teacher shortage, I doubt whether many teachers with attractive alternatives would want to teach at the school. Douglass High School is not a place for teachers with high expectations for their students. English teacher Mr. McDermott resigned in the middle of the school year saying, "Teaching becomes secondary, and discipline is the main thing that goes on. I don't feel like I'm making a difference anymore."
Cameras followed then-principal Isabelle Grant on her visit to the home of a chronically absent student. The student who reads at the fifth- or sixth-grade level is promised that if she attends school regularly she'll be promoted to the 11th grade. It is impossible to eliminate such a reading deficit in a semester. Teachers are pressured into passing failing students. The documentary showed that within a few days of graduation time the school went from having 138 eligible graduates to 200. Promoting and graduating students who haven't made the grade is nothing short of academic fraud.
Douglass High School teachers and staff appeared to be concerned and caring people, but the poor quality educational outcomes demonstrate that concern and caring is not enough. The virtually empty classrooms, filmed on back-to-school night, suggested little parental interest in their children's education. School day behavior demonstrated little student interest. Some students spent class time laughing, joking and tussling with one another. Others had their heads lying on their desks or appeared uninterested in the teacher's discussion. Many of those engaged in student-teacher exchange on academic topics showed very limited reasoning ability.
Frederick Douglass was founded in 1883 as the Colored High and Training School before it was renamed. It is one of the nation's oldest historically black high schools. It was a draw for Baltimore's brightest black students. Success stories among its alumni include Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, as well as several judges, congressmen and civil rights leaders. I guarantee you that if Douglass High student test scores of that earlier era were available, they wouldn't show today's achievement gap. Also, a 1940s or '50s Douglass High graduate would find no comparison between student behavior during their school years and that shown in the documentary.
Politicians and the teaching establishment say more money, smaller classes and newer buildings are necessary for black academic excellence. At Frederick Douglass' founding, it didn't have the resources available today. If blacks can achieve at a time when there was far greater poverty, gross discrimination and fewer opportunities, what says blacks cannot achieve today? Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.
As usual,, Walter Williams is ON THE MARK !!!!!!!!!!!!
Moral of story, “No child left behind” is stupid slogan. You can only help those that want it, whose parents care, otherwise you hold everyone back.
They don’t need to learn any more than vote when they are told to, and to make certain they can spell Democrat Party candidate.
I'm usually quick to blame teachers unions and the education establishment. I do believe that the concept of government schools is flawed and prone to short-change most students.
But Williams clearly establishes the central role that parenting and community culture has to play. This is a very sad story -- and black leaders too often have no incentive to fix the problem. Heck, Michelle Obama was making $300,000 a year as an "outreach worker" which basically means going around telling white folks to feel guilty 'bout keeping the black folks down. Sheesh!
Yep. The only education the Rats want for them is how to pull the D lever for the biggest handout.
The fourth season of The Wire centered around education in Baltimore. It was scary to see what went on. It hit on many of the issues brought up in this article.
One of the producers was a cop for 30 years and then a teacher. He said none of what he saw on the streets of Baltimore prepared him for how bad the schools are.
The tragic thing is how it shows that what separates those who succeed from those who don’t is not money or class, but having parents who are interested in their kids well being. Taking one of the kids the story followed out of his mother’s grasp, who only wanted him to be a drug dealer like his dad, and into the hands or responsible adults made him a better student.
I don’t want to discount other factors, but any president who made strengthening the nuclear family his single domestic policy would probably find that many of the other social ills would take care of themselves.
You know, the black American culture today offers little to emulate. The culture of the Civil War now offers lessons of perseverance, endurance freedom fighting. The culture of the pre Civil Rights movement offers survival skills, family cohesion in the face of hatred; thrift, getting a good education.
Lead horses to water, but they won’t drink if they aren’t thirsty just then. Hurts me a little to read this, must have half-killed Williams to write it. Welfare pays the lazy among the underclasses to stay where they “belong”, watch television, play video games, eat, and reproduce.
Lyndon Johnson said, 40 years ago, as he signed the first antipoverty bill of the Great Society, “We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief or welfare rolls. We want to offer the forgotten fifth of our population opportunity and not doles . . . . The days of the dole in our country are numbered.” But ye have the poor with you always, according to Jesus.
This isn’t news; same song, different day.
The Balto City school system is spending upward of $13,500 per pupil per year (really enough to buy every student his or her own graduate student private teacher and close the buildings) so there is NOTHING that more money can do.
The city school system is filthy with corruption, with tens of millions skimmed just over the last few years alone. As an example, they had millions appropriated for fixing up the facilities but a few years later, when they bothered to follow up, a few rooms had been painted and a broken window here or there had been fixed, but the bulk of the dough just, whoosh, had vanished.
Recently, the city schools had incidents in which students beat up teachers right in the classroom. As it has turned out, the teachers are encouraged not to report this when it happens—but a few sources inside the schools say it is pretty much an everyday thing.
Did anyone see the HBO thing? I didn’t. I wondered if Douglass is the school with its own fire truck—? For one of the high schools in the city the fire dept just parks a truck and crew outside it everyday during the school year because there are about a half-dozen fires per day.
You can blame parents and corrupt officials and politicians and even the teachers union and all deserve it. But the real culprit is this whole sociopathic hip-hop, rap “music” culture that is turning a generation of black youth into savages with no regard for basic civil conduct codes much less education. It explains the Balto city school system, the Christian-Newsom murders in Tenn., and really more incidents and trends than I can list here.
We’re going nowhere but backwards as long as the hip-hop thing is permitted.
Black Academic Excellence is racist ideology. Racists want 'afrocentric' schools so 'black' children will be happy.
So much money is spent dancing around the racial comfort issue.
Climb out of the racial fox holes dug by pandering race community organizers. Breathe the fresh air of freedom from 24/7 racial bigotry. Focusing on 'race' 24/7 stops the education process dead in its tracks.
I certainly agree -- but I'm stunned that so much fashion, TV, music, and film culture seems to be trying to emulate the gangers from the hood. We have white kids in nice towns trying to look and act like they grew up in the ghetto. What's up with that? Who wants to go through life like a n-----? Apparently, a lot of folks.
Bump
I got rid of HBO because it was so filled with victim liberalism but I live in Maryland and you are on the mark. Baltimores schools with public employees union is hopeless.
How sad for our future. You mention the Knoxville killngs so that always strikes a nerve with me as it was so sickening. Considering the garbage in our culture I am almost surprised there aren’t more incidents like that.
In any case, I guess we are to expect President Obama is going to solve all these problems. While I do not want him to win I have to think it will be a consolation to us when after 4 years *nothing* really changes. When inner city schools like this one are just as pathetic, or even worse, then Obama and the left wing Demo phonies will be exposed for what they are. Sadly though, the people who are victimized by these schools, if you can call them that, will vote to reelect him anyway.
I sometimes feel the same way — but overall, I think that the result would be like Communism: “Yes, it failed the first 17 times we tried it, but if we do it right, I’m sure it would be wonderful!” If Obama were president, and if black folks still felt like victims, it would just show that White people aren’t feeling guilty enough and that more pressure needs to be applied.
I’ll try to get this show before I tune in to CNN to find out why whites are responsible for the state of black America.
We’re really not supposed to mention these things.
Shuffle them from one gubmint paid building to another.
Nothing else you can do with animals like that except wait until their old enough to lock them up so they don't bite anyone else.
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