Posted on 09/08/2021 7:50:22 AM PDT by DeweyCA
“[I]f ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big-city public-school systems,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn.
Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth graders in their care are proficient in either math or reading.
In New York City, for example, proficiency rates for black eighth-graders are 10 percent in math and 14 percent in English.
Detroit’s 4% for math and 5% for reading and Milwaukee’s 5% for math and 7% for reading suggests that the rot is “systemic,”
It’s not the money being spent that’s the problem.
The left has been trying to sweep these embarrassing statistics under the rug by “getting rid of the achievement tests that expose it, doubling down on race preferences and trying to hamstring the schools that show black children can and do learn in the right environment,” writes McGurn. The radicals use race as a distraction to deflect attention from their failures...
There are several factors at play for inner-city black youth that aren’t prevalent in the suburbs. But there are pockets of black achievement even in the most violent, drug-ridden neighborhoods. They can be found in charter schools and private parochial schools. But...teachers’ unions—and politicians who cater to their agenda—try to limit opportunities for black parents to take their children out of violent, failing schools.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Government is in the “problem-solving” business.
Which means they want to create problems, they oppose any solutions, and they need a tax increase.
I don’t know any way to test this, but are charter and parochial schools significantly better at teaching, or because of the work the parents need to do to get their kids into them are they just a way of sorting out the good parents from the bad ones? Then having a better set of parents and students you get a virtuous cycle of more studying, less screwing around in class and a better education.
I have mentioned this before. Teachers’ unions are corrupt. (I should know. I was a forced member of a teachers’ union for decades.)
But teachers’ unions have zero power over what is being taught in the schools. Zero, as in none at all.
It’s true that a union can express its opinion on what should be taught. The same goes for the PTA, or any other group. And it’s also true that individual teachers sometimes go off the rails.
But it’s the school board (and sometimes the state) that makes all the curriculum decisions. They have ALL the power. Folks who are blaming a union are aiming at the wrong target entirely.
And permit me to mention on more thing. Most teachers are horrified over what we are forced to teach.
Let me give you just one example. In my school district math teachers are not permitted to teach the times tables! Everything must be done by calculator. It is forbidden to have the students memorize facts like 2x4 = 8.
The math teachers hate this. But it’s school board policy.
And the union had nothing to do with it.
Don’t forget that if a black child does well in school, he gets accused of “acting white”.
There are charter schools where the kids are drawn through a lottery system, and the kids in it excel compared to the kids who didn’t get in. Not all charter schools are super effective, but there are many, especially the KIP schools in NYC.
Good informative post about the power of the school boards and state education bureaucracy over the curriculum. Thank you.
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