Posted on 07/05/2023 6:52:12 AM PDT by The Old Hoosier
...The education system’s failure to prepare non-white students for college admissions on the merits is not just an accident of Democratic one-party rule. It is a feature of Democratic machine politics. The two major teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — tell Democrats to jump; Democrats lack the spine to do anything but ask, “How high?”...
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Lots of their woke readers are going to be triggered.
Related, published last month, eye-popping stats....
https://cis.org/Report/Mapping-Impact-Immigration-Public-Schools
Open borders is propping up teachers unions.
Democrats are actually proud when they expose themselves...
Do a search..first black man and women to graduate from college.
It’s in the 1800s.
And there are numerous examples.
How did blacks pass college during the time of slavery and white privilege?
Some parents give a damn. They make sure their children are educated. They send their children to first grade already reading. They correct the erroneous excrement that their children are taught. They spend endless hours teaching real mathematics. They provide their children the ability to teach themselves so their children can survive the abject failures of government school teachers. It has nothing to do with race.
Especially when children are involved.
The reason why many Blacks could not get admitted to universities based solely on academic merit is an indictment of our failing public education system and race hustlers who push the notion that Blacks are always victims who are powerless to change. Asians do much better not because of race but that they culturally reject the notion of victimhood and prize academic achievement. Affirmative action admissions to universities have done nothing to change the fundamental problems.
“In 2019, 15% of Baltimore City 4th graders tested ‘at or above NAEP proficient’ in math, and 13% did so in reading.”
I believe this is for the reading portion of the exam:
“Among 8th graders in Baltimore City, students averaged a 257, falling short of the 274 average that students scored in other large cities, and the 281 that was the national average, in 2019.”
https://www.mdpolicy.org/policyblog/detail/baltimore-schools-flunked-nationwide-test
Veteran urban public school teacher here. And I must point out that teacher unions have very little influence on what is being taught in the schools. Sure, they can huff and puff on the sidelines. And that’s about all they can do.
In my long career I was on quite a few curriculum committees. And never once was union imput asked for, or received.
What’s absolutely killing us are the university schools of education. They are now churning out totally insane administrators and consultants. These folks have little experience or knowledge regarding how kids actually learn.
Their goal is to convince school boards to include woke nonsense into the curriculum, and into the rules of discipline. In that they have been very successful.
“Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to enslavers’ arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass
“The student body at the schools served by Mount Vernon School District is 4.5% White, 65.8% Black, 1.6% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 26.3% Hispanic/Latino...”
“And 78% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 45% tested at or above that level for math.”
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/new-york/districts/mount-vernon-school-district-111875
It is the job of the:
1. school district to provide the buildings, materials and teachers
2. teachers to provide the supervision, necessary examples and feedback
3. students to provide the necessary attention and effort.
So, honest question here, not trying to flame, but actually seeking your opinion: if the problem is what the ed schools are currently churning out, what explains the last thirty years of steadily declining educational standards?
My middle son enjoyed the strong academic environment and pushed for the same level of academic excellence. Multiple AP classes with top scores. Conducting review sessions for the AP classes in the evenings to help other students succeed. Often taking the lead teaching the content in the classroom because the seat warming teacher didn't know the material.
My middle son tried a "magnet" school with a marine biology focus. To do so, he was at a bus stop at 6:30 AM and didn't get dropped off until 5:30 PM at the bus stop. The program was at an elementary school in a heavy minority neighborhood. It turns out the magnet school was a fraud. Poor academics. The "magnet" content was 30 minutes every other Thursday. The school was a 3 meals per day feeding operation. My son was orders of magnitude ahead of his classmates and often endured a beating during recess for being the top fly on the dung pile. He asked to leave the program and return to our neighborhood school. It took 3 weeks of effort to catch up with grade level work at the neighborhood school that wasn't getting done at the "magnet" school. The only "win" from the magnet school experience was lighting a fire to be fluent in Spanish. He is very fluent and leveraged that skill as a real estate broker in the San Diego area.
> if the problem is what the ed schools are currently churning out, what explains the last thirty years of steadily declining educational standards? <
Fair question. The main problem in urban public education is the lack of effective classroom discipline. That has always been a problem, but it has accelerated over the past thirty years - which is just the time you cited.
A secondary problem is truancy. Truancy laws are no longer enforced like they should be. So kids now come to school whenever they feel like it. No one can master a subject that way.
Here’s a typical situation. It’s Algebra 1 in an urban high school. Most of the kids are okay (even in my worst classes, most of the kids were okay). 30 students are in the rolls. On any given day, maybe 20 or so show up. It’s rarely the same 20. And 2 or 3 are chronically disruptive.
Old days: A truant officer would be trying to get those missing students to attend class. There’d be phone calls and visits home. And disruptive kids would be suspended from school for a day or two, giving the class a bit of breathing room.
Now: There are no truant officers (at least where I taught). And there are no attendance rules. Absenteeism is is high. Disruptive students are NOT suspended, as it would make the school look bad.
Today’s principals get bonuses when suspension rates drop. So there are few suspensions. Teachers are told to handle disruptive students on their own.
That makes the teacher more of a cop, and less of an instructor. How can you teach effectively when one kid is talking on his cell phone, two more are wondering around the room, etc.?
It’s a real mess.
Students whose culture disdains academic achievement as being "too white" will fail and drag down their peers who attempt to excel. Poor impulse control and violent behavior directed against students and staff is condoned. Attempts to punish the bad behavior are characterized as "disproportionately impacting the minority students involved in the acts". It's disproportionate because the white students aren't doing it, thus have no reason to face disciplinary action. Behavior that is allowed and not punished will continue...and it does. The consequence is that good staff exit the classroom for safer places to work. The staff that remain tolerate the abuse because they can't find work elsewhere.
> It was an enjoyable experience because my students wanted to be there. <
I had something like that in my teaching schedule. It was my honors science classes. Kids specifically selected those classes. And if they didn’t do well, or if they misbehaved, they were moved down to the matching mainstream class.
Those honors classes worked well, and I enjoyed teaching them. So of course the school board eliminated all the honors classes. Their student makeup did not reflect the makeup of the school as a whole.
Woke-ism strikes again.
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