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!
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.
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.
Bump
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.
Blacks have completely destroyed the public school system in the US.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=70196
BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS
WorldNetDaily
District gives students exam answers, half still flunk
‘I’m not concerned that it’s a cheat,’ says supervisor
Posted: July 21, 2008
2:42 pm Eastern
The school district of Rochester, N.Y., gave teachers and students exact copies of the questions and answers that would appear on a mandatory test, only to have officials deny wrongdoing and watch half the students fail anyway.
The district requires seventh- and eighth-grade students to take year-end exams in four subjects: English, math, science and social studies. While only the English and math tests are used to determine advancement, the exams do comprise 25 percent of the students’ grades in each course.
Prior to taking the social studies test, however, a district-created study guide available to teachers and students listed multiple-choice questions and answers that were identical and in the same sequence as those that would appear on the social studies exam.
The multiple-choice questions were only a part of the exam, comprising 40 percent of each student’s score, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
It is unknown how many of the district’s seventh- and eighth-graders saw the answers beforehand, said the newspaper, but it was determined that of the 4,329 students who took the exams, 50 percent of the seventh-graders and 44 percent of the eighth-graders failed.
Connie Leech, the district’s supervisor for secondary schools, told the Democrat and Chronicle that the study guides were “probably not in the best judgment” but denied any wrongdoing.
“I’m not concerned that it’s a cheat,” Leech said. “What we were doing is giving kids a better sense of the knowledge that they needed for the test. It’s like giving them an open-book test.”
Ed Roeber, the former director of testing and accountability for the Michigan Department of Education, likened the district’s action to something else. “It’s not a whole lot different from teachers going through the tests and erasing answers and marking correct answers,” he told the Democrat and Chronicle. “I’ve got to wonder if the district is doing anything with the state tests that’s not kosher.”
The study guides, produced by Paul Lampe, the district’s director of social studies, were distributed to be used in class, possibly with PowerPoint, as a review and preparation for the exams. Neither students nor teachers, however, could have known that the questions in the study guides were identical to the exams, since the tests were kept sealed until the day they were taken.
Lampe told the Democrat and Chronicle that he purposefully chose to use the identical questions and answers, but that he had intended to scramble their order. Whether human error or computer glitch led to the sequence being preserved, Lampe insisted the guides were nonetheless not created to artificially boost test scores.
“I’m very sensitive to (teaching to the test),” Lampe said. “That was not the intention of this. The common practice is to review for a test with questions in the same format and with the same language students are going to see. I don’t think this goes into the argument of teaching to the test.”
Roger Schaeffer, a spokesperson for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, disagreed, saying the district’s study guides went “beyond teaching to the test.”
“It’s outright weird,” Schaeffer said. “There’s a continuum of test-prep procedures that range from the ethical to the totally unethical, and it’s generally viewed that preparing kids with identical questions is on the unethical side of the spectrum.”
Rochester Teachers Association President Adam Urbanski called the review method “plain cheating.”
“I can’t imagine anyone making a case for it,” Urbanski told the Democrat and Chronicle. “I wish I could say that I’m surprised. I am not surprised. I strongly suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.”