Posted on 04/11/2003 11:04:18 AM PDT by Michael2001
LOS ANGELES -- Demonstrators urged the Los Angeles school board Tuesday to reconsider the use of tests they say are racist and unfair to blacks and Latinos.
Some people believe the California High School Exit Exam and other standardized tests are culturally biased toward whites and Asians.
"We are concerned about the racist tests that are going on in the schools today," said Paige Leven of the Coalition for Educational Justice.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with proposal from school board members Genethia Hudley Hayes, who is black, and Jose Huizar, who is of Latino descent. They want state officials to explore the "legal, financial and policy implications of establishing a moratorium on the high stakes consequences of the (high school exit exam)."
At the same time, Hayes and Huizar want to continue using results from the exit exam as a "diagnostic tool."
Whites and students of Asian descent typically score better than blacks and Latinos on standardized tests. Huizar said the gap was at least a "20-25 percent disparity."
Last spring, the school board voted 4-1 to consider alternatives to the Stanford 9 and high school exit exam after Hayes and Huizar suggested the tests were biased against nonwhites from poor families.
But Superintendent Roy Romer said the two tests are required by state law.
Tuesday, Hayes and Huizar proposed that the district consider adopting or expanding "alternative or interim assessments to improve the quality of information available to individual classroom teachers."
The alternatives would include "language arts performance assignments" for grades 2-9 and quarterly assessments in math.
Hayes and Huizar also want to create a task force to devise an "Opportunity to Learn Index that would provide public information on ... students' equitable access to tools, resources and materials that inform the educational conditions under which they are assessed."
Demonstrators said many inner-city students were disadvantaged.
"We have very little funds. We have very little books," said Victor Banuelos, an 11th-grade student at Los Angeles High School.
Hayes said she was concerned that the district was considering offering two kinds of high school diplomas -- one saying the student passed the exit exam, and the other saying he or she did not.
The school board will vote on the Hayes-Huizar proposal in two weeks.
BINGO!
In the schools here they've changed questions to be racist the other way ---if you have $3.00 and tacos are $0.50 a piece, how many tacos can you buy ---and still they get the same results ---the white and asian kids still do better ---what else can they do? They're giving the standardized state tests in Spanish now also ---but it isn't helping the drop-out rate.
Could it be possible that more (though certainly not all) of white and Asian parents place a higher emphasis on education and actually expect their children to pass their classes?
What the article did not point out is that on average white students from blue collar families outperform black and hispanic children of college educated white collar parents.
Source??
Link???
Obviously when they give certain tests, the child must look down at their skin or remember their last name before they answer the questions. If they read a book and know the answer, it's up to them to forget it to remain true to their heritage. For the multiculturalists, it's important that hispanic kids know who Emiliano Zapata was but never learn who Thomas Jefferson was, black kids can know who Jesse Jackson is but they shouldn't know about any famous whites.
ETAE
El Testo Aptitudino Espanol
Newton devised a third law of dynamics (or motion) in the 17th century. The third law of thermodynamics wasn't devised until about two hundred years later. You are the weakest link - Goodbye!
You've obviously never read Allan Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which begins:
"..But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular..."
Did you catch all that? The community of the scientific value, for all its marginalized discourse, cannot emanate a counter-hegemonic epistemological narratives with respect to privileged status asserting from dissident or undeniable communities.
"..the mathematical sciences, in the theory of wholes [théorie des ensembles], concern themselves with closed and open spaces ... They concern themselves very little with the question of the partially open, with wholes that are not clearly delineated [ensembles flous], with any analysis of the problem of borders [bords] ..."
[snortle] I don't think I can keep from laughing out loud any longer... God, Sokal makes me proud of the profession... For those of you who are curious, check out Sokal's self-expose, "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies", which starts out--
"..to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
(All emphases mine)
Buff and Bubba are on the 14th hole at Agusta (a par 5) with Buff six strokes up. How many points must Bubba shave per hole if Bubba is to have a greater than 50% chance of "pencil whipping" Buff by the end of the round.
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