Posted on 11/09/2010 10:24:07 AM PST by lbryce
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.
Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.
“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.
The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The demonstrated democrat/liberal cure for this disparity is to lower the abilities of everyone else, so those who are below the standard are then equal to the newly arrived at standard.
There is a black homeschooling movement. Their help is needed badly, as this proves.
BINGO!
That's what happens when you have to dumb down the curriculum so everyone can have a better chance to perform equally.
No Child Left Behind=Teaching to the Lowest Common Denominator. Some children need to be left behind if the majority are to advance
The last 25 years they have done everything they could to make all kids, whites too, as stupid as possible.”
Add to that the fact that for over 45 years, welfare was the substitute for a father & EARNING an income, & you have kids of all colors who don’t think they need to know anything to cash Food Stamps vouchers.
But they have learned with ‘On The Job Training” how to properly cut.weigh, & bag up drugs for sale.
Last year in Manning,SC 84% of all incoming 1st grade students were not ready for 2nd grade. This year, over 44% of the incoming 2nd grade class was reading on what’s called a Pre-Primer level (below or right at Kindergarten).
Schools need more money, much more money. /s
FWIW, in Germany and most of the civilized world, most people do not even enroll in academic high school. At age 14 you are sifted either into trade school or an academic school. Germany only (used to) send about 6% of their kids to academic high school (Gymnasium), whence they almost all went on to University. The numbers are about the same for Japan. Somehow they manage to maintain modern industrial societies. My wife used to work a local middle school that had Metco (Boston inner city) kids bussed in. They were somewhat disruptive in academic classes, but since they were not a critical mass it was manageable. However, they shone in shop class, they loved working with their hands. I’m not saying they were incapable of academic achievement, but maybe somewhat discouraged, especially since they were competing with kids half of whose parents were engineers, doctors or lawyers.
Sending these poor kids to an academic high school is a waste of everyone’s time. Teach them to so something they love and teach them well. They’ll take pride in their accomplishments and be able to make a living for the rest of their lives. And they’ll probably even learn a lot more math, to boot!
No better evidence exist, than, in the Oval Office.
“Proficient” really just means “at grade level”. Nationally, the NAEP shows the substantial majority of children in government schools as below “Proficient” in every academic category.
Although homeschooled students don’t get measured in the NAEP, study after study shows that students who have been homeschooled for several years are about 4 grade levels ahead of their government school peers. The largest-ever (over 12,000 students in the sample), and also the most recent, peer-reviewed study of homeschool academic performance showed that in reading, for example, the AVERAGE homeschooled student scored at the 89th percentile. Government schooled students score on average at the 50th percentile.
Government schools are spiritual, moral, academic, and, all too often, physical child abuse and need to be closed. No exceptions.
Maybe now is the time to roll out the sure to be controversial “Heroin for Homework” program in the inner cities.
I was thinking more in the line of parental encouragement and teaching pitched to the audience, rather than to arbitrary "standards" some moron in Washington dreamt up. We really need to decentralize education and, imho, get the goverment, at all levels, completely out of it.
Like Bill Cosby would tell these knuckleheads, people demonstrated in 1950's and 60's so you could have an opportunity and now, look what you are doing with it.
thank the teacher unions for these dismal numbers
You’re right. My favorite movie line is from Judge Smails in Caddyshack. “The world needs ditch diggers, too.” Not everyone is or will ever be college material. But we all need a skill or trade. We need mechanics, home repair men, construction workers, etc. I vote for a two-tiered set of schools, one is college-prepartory and the other more of a trade school. My wife insists that we need to go back to having all male/female schools and that would solve much of the problem.
Quick! Increase the pensions of the teachers’ union!
“The Bell Curve.”
It concludes that American blacks have IQs which average about 85, vs. whites at about 100.
The book’s conclusions were extensively supported by footnotes, and were in effect a compilation of many studies over decades.
The book was extensively criticized, but nothing to date is very convincing.
That book aside, observing the physical differences between races, one might reasonably conclude mental differences of a similar range.
This problem can easily be solved by increasing teacher salaries, benefits, and pensions.
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