Posted on 10/02/2015 7:23:41 AM PDT by MNDude
Minority students in some San Mateo and Santa Clara County school districts were asked to repeat Algebra 1 when they entered high school even though the students passed the class in 8th grade, according to a report.
A report funded by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation says that math misplacement was done with minority students in a disproportionate number over white students. "It happens because some teachers have a bias toward kids of color, particularly Latino and African American kids," said Emmett Carson, Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO.
Congressional Black Caucus members believe the study shows some school districts are holding a significant number of minority students back from achieving higher education.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcbayarea.com ...
I know of good minority students who are targeted and held back to improve the average scores of successive classes. It’s for the benefit of the educators as that’s how they are rated. They put their career advancement above the needs of performing students.
I took Algebra 1 in 7th and 8th, then again in High school, then again in College. They were each significantly different as you progressed.
Have you seen the writings of students these days? No concept of paragraphs or syntax, no ability to spell correctly. Most hate to read and seem proud of that fact. I see this on social media all the time. Kids these days seem proud of the fact that they are ignorant.
Probably “passed” without learning anything, and a pre-test revealed a lack of foundational understanding to learn the next level.
Explain how you employed IQ measures in your tutoring. Explain how you evaluated how cultural factors did not impact the ability of the students to think.
Then we can talk about leaving dream worlds.
Like I have tried to say... culture thing.
quote “It happens because some teachers have a bias toward kids of color”
well... they have it right, but drew the wrong conclusion!
Yes some teachers have a bias IN FAVOR of kids of color and pass them when they have not come close to mastering the material. When this is discovered in following years they are made to retake the course they were “given” a passing grade in before only because they were a “person of color”
I know we had experience with a minority student elementary school and our interaction with the teachers and and administration were appalling. They had no interest in educating the kids or even whether the kids attended school. If the middle schools feeding this high school are similar, then the policy may not be such a bad idea.
This school was not more than 2 miles from some of the best middle schools in Denver. But it might as well have been a different planet.
You'd be surprised about how deep this $h+t runs, or maybe you wouldn't. Our school district just put a kid through one of the more expensive private colleges in Pittsburgh.
Our district's high school is roughly 90% white, a demographic which accounts for merely 30% of the disclipline problems. It just isn't fair!
The PC Principal was so overjoyed when she found the cell phone number of a white student on the log of calls received during a bomb scare early one Monday morning in November some years ago. They hauled the kid, paraded his name all through the media and put him in juvenile detention.
Oops! It turned out their evidence was faulty because they forgot to account for the changeover off daylight time. It was more than one hour off. Plus the kid had recorded the call-- it was to the homework hotline. Plus he was an honor student (and friend of my daughter who worked with him in an after school service club). They even tried to point these facts out during the initial detention, but the principal would have none of it. She wanted that white boy's scalp!
What she didn't count on was that the boy's parents had the money to hire a very expensive lawyer who proceeded to take the district to the cleaners. A very happy ending for the kid because his partly academic scholarship just turned into a full ride as if he was a Heisman Trophy candidate.
Sadly, the dimwit PC principal still has her job.
Sort of like the Prophet Mohammed who had to dictate the Koran to a literate scribe?
I’d pretty much guarantee that the middle schools have different racial compositions and different levels of mastery required for equivalent grades in what probably is not even taught as equivalent levels of rigor for the same supposed ‘algebra’ class.
A student with a C grade in a a watered down middle school algebra class would likely simply flunk a more rigorous geometry class in the 9th grade, at the district-consolidated high school.
The system is probably doing most such students a real favor by having them repeat algebra 1 at the high school level.
Devonte, where’s your homework?
Devonte, you haven’t turned in your homework from yesterday.
Devonte, it’s been a week and you still haven’t turned in your homework.
Devonte, are you ever going to turn in your homework this year?
If the 8th grad class that was passed was in a majority Negro school the standard to pass was likely lower than otherwise and the student would not pass the entrance requirements for the high school course in a majority non-Negro school.
15 years ago or so when my boy was a High school senior he told me about a conversation he heard in the lunch room at a nearby table of Negro students. Two were berating a third for acting white. The third replied that white people got all the good jobs byu they way they acted and made more money. Everybody should “act white.” The other side of the conversation degenerated into four letter words, most of which “would probably be misspelled if they were written down (what my son said).
I didn’t employ any IQ measures in tutoring and it wasn’t my job to evaluate “cultural factors” only to teach.
My college courses included a genetic psychology component. Identical twins raised apart tested +/- 5 points of the same IQ regardless of whether they were raised by wealthy or poor families. Where a discrepency was found, the low birth weight twin was found to have the lower score and attributed to shared placental blood giving the lower birth weight twin the "backwash". Mental illness also tends to run in families along with criminal tendencies. Certainly some of it is multi-generational/cultural/social factors, but the genetic component remains an unalterable contribution.
I totally agree. But the narrative for the last fifty years is that schools fail the students. Fifty years ago when I was in school and I did poorly in some classes (and I did poorly in a number of classes), the school was not blamed. The onus was put on me for not studying hard enough and for not paying attention during class. For which I plead guilty as charged.
But since then, both liberals and conservatives have seen fit to blame the schools for poor student scholastic performance. I doubt the schools are at fault. I've read too many stories of Asian immigrants doing very well at many of these "poor" schools to believe it's the schools.
When a student doesn't do well in school, 90% of the time it's the student and his family who are at fault.
I've always found the accusation that the nation's public school teachers (who on the whole are some of the most liberal, Dem-supporting people in the country) are all just nasty racist, Klan members trying to hold black students back farcical.
When I was in school in virtually all white classes, white students who did poorly held themselves back. Nobody blamed the teachers or the school admin.
Black students hold themselves back. Libs are just totally unable to face that fact.
What is labeled "acting white" is usually labeled acting mature, civil and practicing good manners with others. Showing up on time and doing your work consistently is also important. Those qualities are missed by the "losers". A local Walmart manager said she had plenty of people applying for jobs. The problem is they didn't actually want to work. They thought simply showing up earned a paycheck. Nope! They didn't come back to "work".
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