"In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student. ... This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. .. We, too believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisam coalition that challenges the entrenched eduation establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to 'what works' to dramatically boost academic achievement--rather than clinging to reforms that we 'wish would work.' ... Dismissing the potential of schools to substantially boost minority achievement, as is now fashionable in some Democratic circles, is ultimately little more than a recipe for defeatism. ... First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests", my emphasis, Joel Klein and Al Sharpton (K&S) at the WSJ, 12 January 2009.
Good luck, K&S. You''ll need it. What's "insidious" about the achievement gap? We can do it! Just clap hands! We do not accept "defeatism". Why should "national standards" be better here than in say the insurance business? What will an "education SEC" do anyway? See my 1 and 18 September and 27 November 2008 and 5 and 7 January 2009 posts:
6 comments:
Joel Klein and Al Sharpton... do your duty and start the real reform in New York City... your homey town... you said the answer... DO IT!
"bipartisam coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment" =
Bust the teachers union... one more time... bust the teachers union... again (IA likes things put forcefully)
*** bust the teachers union ***
All the rest is caca.
Pop,
What about education as a whole? Forget the lines of "diversity" - as a mixed race (white/Hispanic) individual, I could have taken advantage of a multitude of crutches along the way to receive special treatment and exceptions. Instead I was bored to death with public school and they literally allowed a child who learned to read at 2 years old to fall out of the race because the standard set for students of my age group was, to me, preschool bullshit that was never enough to keep my attention.
It has absolutely nothing to do with race. It has to do with the collective dumbing down of America. Sadly, if you factor in race, that means that the low income and less-equipped-for-success contingent have a standard set even lower than "average" - "average" already being moronic.
It is a pathetic reflection of our lazy, broken system which is built to spit out lazy, broken people. As long as they can do the work, who cares if they can think? White, black, hispanic - no one cares. We merely need bodies. In fact, it's better if they don't think lest they turn on the very machine which spat them out stupid and lazy.
It is your "insidious achievement gap" which frightens me - with a bar already set so low, it amazes me that minority and low-income students are even capable of reaching higher education. Not because they do not possess the potential but because they spend their lives fighting against a system that does not encourage any growth or achievement whatsoever, with little financial leverage to beat the odds.
It makes me sick.
Reform? Never. Were these people allowed the resources and the encouragement to thrive (thereby encouraging free thought and ideals based beyond the most simple of human desires), that would put the entire system at risk. You cannot promote free thought in traditionally suppressed and abused groups of people; naturally, with a little awareness and true education, these would be the very people that might be in a position to topple that system.
Let the collective dumbing down continue...
Junior
Yeah, and I should be able to slam dunk like Kobe.
Edgar:
84% of NBA players are black. So? What's wrong with that? No one would pay to see me play basketball. Should the NBA create an affirmative action program for white boys?
Whatever happened to the negro? Did Johnson/Kennedy and the Great Society push them into the basement?
Now we have blacks and African-Americans. Bring back the negro and bring back achievement.
Martin Luther King was both a negro and a Republican. Now that segment holds Obama to be a leader, who by the way is classed racially as a white person, because anyone from Africa, not the USA, is classified as white. This is a fact of our racially twisted, entitlement society.
Should the NBA create an affirmative action program for white boys?
Yes, or let us put springs in our shoes or something. ;D
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