Posted under Education & Multiculturalism & Race
When a high-paid “diversity consultant” promises he can close the Black-White achievement gap, it pays to check out his past performance – otherwise, you might get nothing but more problems. From the Charlotte Pundit House.
Posted under Affirmative Action & Education & Race
After years of stubbornly trying to implement pie-in-the-sky goals that assumed all children are above average, one state school board has decided to give reality a try:
The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent.
Naturally, this evoked the expected howls of protest from the usual suspects:
But Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale. …
Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race.
Handy word, “racism.” In this case, Robinson is using it to defend the old “anti-racist” policy of penalizing teachers and dooming children to failure in the name of upholding ideological bias. “You’re equal, dammit! Act that way!”
The cult of egalitarian multiculturalism is collapsing before our eyes.
Posted under Education
I’m late coming to this story but apparently a white student union has formed at Towson University. Matthew Heimbach, the organizer, gives the following reasons for forming the union (USA Today):
“You have a Black Student Union who promotes black heroes, we want to do the same thing,” Heimbach said to the Towerlight. “We’d also want to create a safe space for members who have filed hate/bias reports and who have had anti-white language used against them. Especially the female members who have heard ‘cracker’ and ‘honkie,’ and nothing has ever come of it. It’s a support network for a campus that is hostile toward white students.”
“White students share a bond that is far deeper than skin color; the identity of the folk may have been trampled and attacked for generations but it is time to reestablish ourselves as a people and stand up for our rights,” he wrote in his letter to the editor. “We must protect the security of Europeans and a future for the next generation.”
Here’s a video of their first meeting:
Posted under Affirmative Action & Education & Humor & Political Correctness
There’s a discrepancy of outcomes at a prestigious public school – clearly this is a case of White privilege! The NAACP and the “Coalition of Silence” spring into action!
Will the Department of Education’s latest lawsuit against a state school uncover this latest conspiracy against minority children? Click here for the answer!
Posted under Education
I love “grumpy old man” commentaries (no ofense to Dr. Gottfried) talking about the “good ol’ days” and how things “ain’t like they used to be.” Here’s one from Dr. Gottfried at AmConMag decrying the sorry state of “higher education.”
I used to get dirty looks toward the end of my teaching career when I asked students in Western Civilization courses what books they had read. These students didn’t open books, perhaps on principle. I’ve no idea why they’re in college, except to meet significant others and to enjoy leisure time at the expense of their parents or of American taxpayers. As I like to point out, such college residents are students in the same sense I would be a player in the national hockey league, if I signed up in a program that allowed me to imagine I was something I was not. Of course, since these kids, or their enablers, are paying at least one hundred times more than I did for my education, they get their illusions and sybaritic tastes indulged.
Preach on Dr. G.! Preach on!
Posted under Constitution Party & Education
Listen here. The caption reads:
Darrell Castle discusses the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report and recommendations on US Education. By the way, who or what is “human capital?”
Posted under Education & States Rights
Mainstream conservatives (translation: liberals with flag lapel pins) are just cooing about how this disastrous federal law is finally being dismantled State by State. But the details of what’s actually being implemented reveal we’re joy riding through a constitutional mine field:
States must commit to turning around failing schools and tying teacher evaluation to student achievement to sidestep the nation’s main public-education law, President Barack Obama said.
States that take those and other steps will be granted waivers from the No Child Left Behind law’s 2014 deadline for reaching 100 percent proficiency on standardized state reading and math exams, according to a White House statement yesterday.
No good can come of this. The “No Child Left Behind” legislation was a major assault on States’ Rights. There is NOTHING in the Constitution that grants the central government the power to control the States’ schools. The ONLY reaction to this illegal legislation should have been nullification. But since No Child was rammed through by George W. Bush, a mainstream conservative (see definition above), conservatives accepted it.
Obama is no dummy. Notice how he’s using the partial dismantling of a disastrous mistake as an excuse to re-affirm the sovereignty of the central government over the people of the States. Notice, also, how the State legislators are rolling over in humble compliance. The poor fools think they’ve won something.
Posted under Affirmative Action & Education & Humor & Political Correctness
In addition to serving as Atlanta Public Schools superintendent, Dr. Beverly Hall is chair of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Urban Superintendents Program, where she serves as a mentor superintendent to participants in the doctoral program. She also is a member of the Teaching Commission, which develops specific policy recommendations to deal with the teaching crisis in America.
Dr. Hall is the recipient of many local and national honors, including the American Association of School Administrators’ 2006 Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, the Martin Luther King Jr. “Ground Crew” Award, the Big Brothers Big Sisters Legacy Award and the Atlanta Urban Debate League’s award named in her honor, the Beverly L. Hall Urban Debate Administrator of the Year Award.
Here’s a video of Dr. Hall wowing Congress’ Education and Labor committee. Could the position of Education Secretary be far behind, where, from such a lofty fulcrum, she could move the entire education system?
But rumors circulated that her miraculous results were phony. Dr. Hall ordered an internal investigation that concluded there were no problems [?!]. However, a state investigation has revealed a wide-spread, coordinated effort to pump up scores:
Georgia investigators have found evidence of cheating at close to 80 percent of the Atlanta schools where they examined the 2009 administration of state tests.
The 48,000-student Atlanta district has been under a cloud for the past two years, ever since an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found improbably high results on the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, or CRCT.
So now we’re looking at a criminal case against both Dr. Hall and her assistant Kathy Augustine.
Have we learned anything? When the next miracle worker proclaims he’s found the secret to making all children above average, will we believe him?
Of course we will. There’s something bigger at stake here than just a vast conspiracy to commit educational fraud. The real issue is the government’s commitment to equality, to the notion that all good things come from government itself, and that its citizens, especially schoolchildren, are its passive raw materials.
The issue here is not whether Hall broke a few rules. She did. But if Dr. Hall is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? Isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society, and its pursuit of diversity? Well, you can do whatever you want, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to condemnations against the United States of America!
Take it away, Otter:
Posted under Conservatism & Education & Election 2012 & Uncategorized
The hopeless debtor city of Stockton, California, was recently in the news, the sight of an armed raid, courtesy, the armed wing of the Department of Education (who knew?), (notice it’s a cache link as the story is getting scrubbed) for something to do with Student Loans.
It is often difficult to peel back the onion of a debtor—at least the gambler is occasionally romantic as Dostoevsky suggested. The woman in question was not at the residence, and the story has moved on to allege she had skipped out on the family, and now the DOE is suggesting it was not related to ‘Student Loans’ but rather fraud.
Posted under Culture & Education & Humor
Or do they? These members of the “indispensable nation” do know one thing: Eternal war is official US policy. When asked which country the US should invade next, one man says, “I’m thinking Italy.” And another gives a provocative answer when asked what countries constitute the Axis of Evil: “California and New York,” he says. He has a point.
This hilarious and yet disturbing video is here. Enjoy.
Posted under Education & Immigration & Survival of the West
DC’s demographic reconstruction of America rolls along:
Latinos now make up a majority of California’s public school students, cracking the 50 percent barrier for the first time in the state’s history, according to data released Friday by the state Department of Education.
Almost 50.4 percent of the state’s students in the 2009-10 school year identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, up 1.36 percent from the previous year.
This is a boon for California education officials struggling with that persistent racial achievement gap. Now, critics can’t complain minorities have lower average test scores than majority students. Another brilliant government success story!
Posted under Education & Political Correctness & Race & Science
“Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste—an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again. Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian—i.e., unattainable—and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence. Teach all kids to the limit of their ability, while recognizing that all are not equal in their ability to read, write, learn, compute or debate, any more than they are equally able to play in a band or excel on a ball field….. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be.” ~ Patrick J. Buchanan, Op-Ed, August 26, 2010
I wonder whether Buchanan will get any flack for his op-ed today?
It’s odd. What he writes everyone knows to be true. Yet, he is not allowed to say it. Even stranger, the left still presents religion as the enemy of science. But, in reality, it’s egalitarianism that’s at odds with science, at least with evolutionary theory. If Eurasians separated from Africans around 100,000 years ago, and Europeans and Asians separated from each other around 40,000 years ago, it stands to reason that these groups would have evolved along different paths. James D. Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, notes that genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence can be found within a decade. He writes:
“There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
It’s the difference between is and ought. Just because egalitarians wish for things to be equal doesn’t mean they are equal. How much longer will egalitarianism be at war with science? And how much longer will European Americans suffer because of this war?
Posted under Economics & Education & Race & Uncategorized
Next spring, April 13-16, 2011 to be exact, the annual White Privilege Conference will take place in Bloomington, Minn. A group leftist race-baiters have been holding this conference which will go about accusing white of having not just a disproportionate amount of wealth in the country, but so-called “privileges” exclusive only to whites in the U.S. Your guess is a good as mine as to what they are but apparently they exists because these people say they do.
Read through the entire article and one gets the sense that the rhetoric this conference uses is similar to that of the Ku Klux Klan: white people are special simply because they are white. Of course anyone who is white and poor in this country knows this is complete BS but once again a claque of people spend their time trying to convince poor whites to overlook their economic woes and embrace the fact they have skin. Only this crowd does so through a different point of view.
One woman describe the experience as having her “blinders taken off.” Well, I too hope the persons who attend this conference have their blinders taken off as well. In fact, I’ll volunteer my services to do so. I will be happy to transport them around my county and elsewhere in western Wisconsin and Minnesota so they can witness the white poor, up close and personal in their broken down trailers and farm homes and explain all these special privileges they receive for being white. I’m sure they just don’t know what they are. I guess they’ve been too busy, I don’t know, trying to keep from starving or worrying about unemployment or whether their mine might collapse on them or getting their faces blown off in Iraq or Afghanistan because nobody else wishes to serve in the military. That’s it, they’ve been too busy to figure all this out. There’s got to be a special benefit to being white they’re missing out on and I hope the persons at this conference will go inside their shotgun shacks and explain it to them because I certainly can’t.
Posted under Education
College graduates this spring are entering into a terrible job market this spring, many with degrees that may not mean much when it comes to finding that well-paying job that will provide the money to get them out of debt.
This situation is finally waking up many to the realization that perhaps there are too many kids in college and that the emphasis that was put on kids getting degrees or spending on education for the past 30 years or so has led to a world of college graduates working as shift manager at a big-box store.
The linked article made this very good point:
“Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder blames the cultural notion of “credential inflation” for the stream of unqualified students into four-year colleges. His research has found that the number of new jobs requiring college degrees is less than number of college graduates.
Vedder’s work also yielded something surprising: The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows — the reverse of long-held assumptions.
“If people want to go out and get a master’s degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that’s fine,” he said, citing an example from a recent encounter with a worker. “But I don’t think the public should be subsidizing it.”
No they shouldn’t. And if U.S. wants to revive its industrial economy, it’s going to need m0re trained engineers, millwrites and welders than MBA because persons holding those jobs are in their 60s and want to retire but can’t because their are hardly any young persons in such fields because they’re all off college vying for MBAs and English majors to land that great paying job. The problem is, a lot of good paying jobs go unfilled chasing jobs that are becoming more scarce now thanks to globalization and technology.
What the Great Recession has exposed is not only a house-of-cards economy built on debt and credit, but also one out of wack in terms of priorities and needs.
Posted under Affirmative Action & Education & Political Correctness & Race
Like others, when I first heard the rumor that Bill Gates scholarships excluded European Americans, I thought the rumor must be an exaggeration. I was wrong. The scholarship application FAQ’s page clearly states:
Students are eligible to be considered for a GMS scholarship if they: Are African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian Pacific Islander American or Hispanic American…..
What ethnic groups comprise Asian Pacific Islander Americans?
Asian Pacific Islander Americans include persons having origin from Asia and/or the Pacific Islands. Asian includes persons having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. Pacific Islander includes persons having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawai’i, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. Citizens of the republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau are also eligible to be nominated.
So, basically, almost anyone can apply — anyone except a white person.
As Rob Sanchez points out, this should be no surprise:
Theodore Cross, writer at the The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, wrote a paper in 1999 that discusses the history of the Bill Gates scholarship: “Bill Gates’ Gift to Racial Preferences in Higher Education“. Make no mistake, Cross thinks it’s a darn good idea that Gates discriminates against whites, and he isn’t very subtle about it either:
“Racial conservatives are correct. The huge billion-dollar Gates Millennium Scholarship program is racially discriminatory. The terms could not be cleaner. Whites may not apply!”
Posted under Education & Immigration
How much do you know about immigration?
Take a look at the first three immigration module courses at the new Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Online University.
About the university:
This new “gateway” offers facts, figures, and historical perspectives on how the immigration issue has affected the United States’ political, social, and economical realms over the past 150 years. It also begins to offer solutions to bring about true immigration reform that serves the national interests of the United States.
FAIR has created this educational curriculum, beginning with three initial modules, and will continue to add new modules over the coming months. Once you’ve completed the three initial courses you will be prompted to download your own copy of the FAIR Online University certificate of completion.
We hope you enjoy the Online University and that you will share the information you find here with your friends and colleagues.
Posted under Christianity & Education & Religion
Ahhhhm, not to sound naive, but … is this for real?
Posted under Academia & Culture & Education & Religion & Science
I had planned to post on this issue, but Patroon beat me to it. The issue is a clause in the Texas standards that requires the teaching of the “strengths and weaknesses” of a scientific theory. The nerve of them! How dare someone suggest that the gospel according to Darwin has weakness?
On the surface, the debate centers on a passage in the state’s curriculum that requires students to critique all scientific theories, exploring “the strengths and weaknesses” of each. Texas has stuck to that same standard for 20 years, having originally passed it to please religious conservatives. In practice, teachers rarely pay attention to it.
This year, however, a panel of teachers assigned to revise the curriculum proposed dropping those words, urging students instead to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence.”
Scientists and advocates for religious freedom say the battle over the curriculum is the tip of a spear. Social conservatives, the critics argue, have tried to use the “strengths and weaknesses” standard to justify exposing students to religious objections in the guise of scientific discourse.
I have no sympathy for the Darwinian fundamentalists here. They have done this to themselves. Instead of simply using Darwin’s theory to explain speciation and adaptation, which very few would object to, they are the ones who insist on dogmatic naturalism, materialism and scientism and suggest that Darwin’s theory eliminates the need to invoke a Creator. And then they get their panties in a wad when Christians object. Go figure.
Cross posted at the New Media Alliance blog.
Posted under Education & Political Correctness
Here’s what’s being done to our children in the Federalized government schools:
A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.
The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.
A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report. …
The boy — a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student — cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.
He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.
District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.
That last paragraph can be translated as: “We’re government employees — we’re not paid to think.” Continue Reading »
Posted under Academia & Conservatism & Education & Election 2008
One of the stupidiest things that has ever appeared on Lew Rockwell.com’s website is this blog post by Stephan Kinsella. I never would have thought the editors would fall for the phony populism but they did hard in this case. Yes they were trying to defend Sarah Palin from attacks by the Democrats but are doing using the same wore-out old “snob/elitist/arugula-eating” arguments popularized by their supposed enemies, the necon Republicans.
You don’t have to go to Starbucks, which I don’t by the way, to wonder if someone who’s only served two years as governor of Alaska and who over a decade ago was on the Wasilla city council, is cut out to be president. Sarah Palin may make a very good vice president, but one of the pre-requisites of the job is being capable of filling-in in case something bad happens to head man. I need not remind anyone that politicans who are not ready for the prime-time stage can hurt themselves badly. Remember Dan Quayle? As much as Jimmy Carter’s “outsider” image was appealing, his lack of Washington experience really hurt his administration. In retrospect, he would have been better served running for Congress and winning in 1966 than running for Governor of Georgia that year and losing. A couple years in D.C. would have helped. Certainly a George W. Bush II who spent some time in his father’s administration, might have better resisted the bad advice given to him by Dick Cheyney and the neocons. It takes a fox to know where the jackels are.
But according to Mr. Kinsella, we cannot question Ms. Palin’s experience. To do so, is “elitist” because Ms. Palin is a “woman” of the people” and only such people are qualified for national office because they are of “the people.” Education means nothing. Skills mean nothing. Experience means nothing. Connections mean nothing. Only those who are authentically “of the people”, meaning they can shoot guns and ride snowmobiles, are qualified to hold high office. If you happen to like classical music and went to four-year university, then you are considered a snob and enemy of the “real people” like Sarah Palin, and therefore not qualified. I didn’t realize we lived in a communist state.