Some news from across America.
First, Boston:
Boston Public Schools Suspends Test For Advanced Learning Classes; Concernas About Program’s Racial Inequities Linger
A selective program for high-performing fourth, fifth and sixth graders in Boston has suspended enrollment due to the pandemic and concerns about equity in the program, GBH News has learned.
Superintendent Brenda Cassellius recommended the one-year hiatus for the program, known as Advanced Work Classes, saying the district would not proceed with the program for new students next year.
New students will be admitted in the fourth grade by standards to be determined at the school level, according to a BPS spokesman.
There will be no new students admitted in the fifth or sixth grades, the spokesman said, but those already in advanced work will be allowed to continue.
A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
“This is just not acceptable,” Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. “I’ve never heard these statistics before, and I’m very very disturbed by them.”
Avanced academic performance can no longer be allowed if there isn’t equity in the students admitted into the advanced classes.
Why encourage kids to work hard and learn the subject if they are just going to get their legs cut out from under them if they do because someone else’s arbitrary standards of demographic equity are not met?
Over to Buffalo, New York:
Failure Factory
Buffalo’s school district tells students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”—while presiding over miserable student outcomes.
The story of Buffalo Public Schools is a sad and familiar one: a dying industrial town, underperforming inner-city schools, and high rates of failure among racial minorities. Instead of focusing on improving academic achievement, however, Buffalo school administrators have adopted fashionable new pedagogies: “culturally responsive teaching,” “pedagogy of liberation,” “equity-based instructional strategies,” and an “emancipatory curriculum.”
Last year, in her role as director of the Office of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, Morrell created a new curriculum promoting Black Lives Matter in the classroom and an “antiracist” training program for teachers. According to one veteran teacher, who requested anonymity, Morrell’s training programs have pushed “radical politics” and, in practice, become a series of “scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel ‘empowered.’” Teachers must submit to these “manipulative mind games” and express support for Morrell’s left-wing politics, or risk professional retaliation.
During one all-hands training session, the details of which I have obtained through a whistleblower, Morrell claimed that America “is built on racism” and that all Americans are guilty of “implicit racial bias.” She argued that “America’s sickness” leads some whites to believe that blacks are “not human,” which makes it “easier to shoot someone in the back seven times if you feel like it.”
The new training sessions and curriculum are unlikely to lead to better student academic outcomes. Buffalo Public Schools have been an abject failure: by fifth grade, only 18 percent of students are proficient in math and 20 percent of students are proficient in English; one-third of all students fail to graduate from high school. The numbers are even worse for African-Americans, who constitute 45 percent of the student population. And according to the veteran teacher, despite the new “antiracism” programming, the district’s poor response to the pandemic has accelerated racial inequalities, with virtual attendance rates as low as 30 percent in some classrooms.
In Buffalo, the black student can’t read or do math, but instead of the teachers working harder to educate them, they are teaching them that their failures are because of systemic racism.
Black poverty in Buffalo is probably much more related to young black adults not being able to make change or be able to read an instruction manual and not have even the rudimentary skills for employment than it is racism.
However, it’s easier to teach the kids they are the victims of racism than how to read and do math.
The New York Post published this article:
To stop educational wokeness, force teachers to actually teach
The woke hold that our society is fundamentally unjust and that we must always strive for greater justice. In practice, it translates into to abject foolishness, such as the charge that math is racist.
No, that’s not a joke. A consortium of 25 education organizations has offered “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” which seeks to “dismantle racism in mathematics instruction.” The group detects white supremacy in such insidious practices as focusing on the right answer or having to show your work (i.e., learning).
It isn’t a coincidence that a rise in wokeness in our schools has corresponded with a decline in actual education. Every minute spent on creating fake outrages and punishing Lincoln is a minute not spent on academic subjects. In a year full of those empty minutes, wokesters have found a way to fill the time.
I wrote about Seattle’s anti-racist math in a previous post.
The Left is killing education. Leftist teachers have no desire to teach. Teaching helps students. They want to indoctrinate kids to see racism everywhere and blame it for everything.
This invites more government into their lives. These kids will demand government fix their lot in life and provide for them because they will lack the skills necessary to take care of themselves.
Clearly, education in Blue areas of our country is dead, the rest of us need to make sure it doesn’t kill education in the rest of Amercia.
Like this:
Like Loading...
