Posted on 01/19/2010 6:02:34 AM PST by Kaslin
Let me share with you an interesting article from The Washington Post about the teacher of an all-black class in a high school in Alexandria, Va., who expressed his frustration at how poorly the students were performing. The class included both native-born African-Americans and kids who had emigrated from Africa.
In a moment of exasperation, the teacher blurted out this question to the native-born students: "Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?" One of them shot back the answer.
The kid replied, "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study." Another student called out, "Ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us."
The teacher did ask the class, and not one hand went up. The students had figured out, even if schoolteachers and administrators are still in the dark, that the essential difference between kids who make it in school and those who don't is whether they have their father in the home.
It isn't a matter of race -- the African-Americans and the Africans are the same race. It isn't because the school doesn't have enough money -- this school has so much money that it gives every student a laptop of his own.
The basic problem is the lack of fathers in the home. And why didn't these kids have fathers in the home?
For the majority of them, the reason is the liberal welfare system, which transformed the people who were given "free" money called "welfare" into a society of single moms. In this matriarchy, fathers were made unnecessary -- even an impediment to the flow of taxpayer handouts.
Now we see the terrible consequences of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously predicted in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson started his Great Society spending. Welfare reform was passed in 1996 and even signed by Bill Clinton, but President Obama had those reforms repealed in his stimulus bill last year.
The anti-marriage feminists are unwilling to fault the matriarchal society, and so the academic feminists keep looking for other causes of poor grades by minority students. An outfit called the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group is trying to get the University of Minnesota to make race, class and gender the "overarching framework" of all teacher education coursework.
This busybody task group is part of the university's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, which is premised on the notion that Minnesota teachers' lack of "cultural competence" contributes to the poor academic performance of minority students. The plan would require teachers to be re-educated so they will teach Minnesota minority kids that America is an oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic country.
According to the final report of the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group last year, in order to effectively teach a diverse class of students, teachers must understand how "white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression" have impacted their thinking.
The report demands that teachers be trained to instruct students on the U.S. "myth of meritocracy," the "history of white racism" and "demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values."
This task group even has plans to browbeat into submission those who don't accept these new liberal dictates. The group calls on the university to develop "a remediation plan" for non-performing students and teachers.
Such outlandish proposals have not gone unnoticed. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) accuses these re-education plans of violating "the freedom of conscience of the university's students," and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) charges that these plans "ignore academic goals and lead to a politicized determination of who is qualified to be a teacher."
The University of Minnesota may pretend to back off from the more outrageous of these proposals, but they are totally in sync with William Ayers' "social justice" teaching and the more recent buzz word "cultural competence." The bottom line is to teach the younger generation that they are victims of an oppressive and unjust America, and that they should organize and demonstrate (a la Saul Alinsky) to take power and money away from those who have those things.
Another ominous straw in the wind is Obama's appointment of six way-out radicals to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), whose mission is to evaluate whether accrediting agencies are properly assessing the quality of colleges and universities. The appointees are the sort of Obama extremists who will be likely to try to enforce diversity mandates and social engineering on institutions seeking accreditation.
The most important thing schools should do for minority (and other) schoolchildren is to teach them how to read by phonics in the first grade. They could do this inexpensively with my "First Reader" (www.firstreader.com) -- and if the schools refuse, this book is the perfect tool for parents to teach their own children.
Key ghost, please remove the A ;-)
New book: “Why Jamal Can’t Read”
Waht’s the point - no one in the target group can read... :)
1. Start with how they are, not how you would wish it to be. Maybe the class of kids with no fathers could motivate and encourage each other. They could form study groups, and have some healthy rivalry to try to keep up with or move ahead of each other. They do it on the basketball court, in a sense. They could also do it academically. At my kids’ school, the motivated kids are a good peer influence on each other, although I admit that it is not as strong an influence as their motivated parents.
2. Young men need to start to have some pride in their future as fathers, as respectable men, and make decisions about sex, marriage and parenthood accordingly. They need to pick women who, like them, have accepted “the mission” of making the raising of their family the main goal of their lives. There was a book awhile back about “the mission”. It seems that the author established that it wasn’t whether you were rich or poor that made a difference in your kids. It was whether the parents were dedicated to “the mission.”
We have to start calling a spade a shovel. The vast majority of blacks do horribly (not just poorly) in school for the reason cited. When the first question on a test is “father’s name”, it is like putting a person in a round room and telling them to piss in the corner. They can’t win. I have said it before that Obummer is out to destroy the country and he is using the blacks and minorities as his first wave of fighters. He is turning blacks against whites and “the rich” and he has a ready army to do his bidding. Problem for them is I am one of those whites, fairly rich and I own guns. Bring it a**holes. Justice will be done.
Why don’t kids do well in school? The Education Trifecta - the federal dept of ed, teachers’ unions, and poor quality teachers.
No- it’s about the democratic plantation. The message is you can make on you own merit. The deck is stacked against you. Just give up now and we’ll find you a place on the plantation. As long as you do as we tell you, everything will be just fine.
Learnt, hahaha.
Maybe the most prescient post I have ever had the pleasure of reading...
I won’t argue there are some crappy schools and staff, but even with the best of everything it still comes down to the parents. I’ve seen schools where kids who want to learn can’t due to poor surroundings and other disruptive kids.
If it were up to me, I’d close all the public schools.
I wouldn’t close all of them. There is a public charter school in my state nicknamed “the immigrant school.” The kids are Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, 45% eligible for free lunch, most parents foreign born, all children speak a foreign language at home and they just blew the fancy schmancy upper middle-class public schools out of the water as far as state test scores are concerned. They did better than the middle school next door to me, and my town spends about $14,000 per student. The charter school spends about $7,000 per student. Parents are standing in line to get their children into this school, so you’re right when you say it all comes down to the parents. It comes down to the students too.
The point is that according to the Left it is more important to be conscious of your race, gender, sexual orientation etc... and to learn the implications of those things than it is to learn readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmatic (so to speak). They believe that learning about the social “sciences” is paramount to anything - which is why they believe meritocracy is crap and why we believe their ideas are crap.
John McWhorter was saying this 15 years ago.
Interesting question. Part of my job is to help kids get back on track when they are having difficulty. Many times people don’t see the reason why they should bother doing the heavy lifting and the hard work when they can have everything provided for them without having to do so.
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