Posted on 09/21/2012 10:04:06 AM PDT by jazusamo
In a first for any American public school system, education officials in the District of Columbia have set new achievement targets for students based on race and income with lower goals for black, Hispanic and poor kids and higher ones for whites and Asians.
Washington D.C. officials are simply following a national trend implemented by the Obama Administration, which is paying states to adopt different education achievement goals for different groups of children. The administration is just “trying to be realistic about what’s achievable,” according to a U.S. Department of Education (DOE) official quoted in the mainstream newspaper that reported the dramatic shift in policy this week.
Besides D.C., more than two dozen states have set special academic targets for different groups of students, which the news story points out represents a sea of change in national education policy that for years prescribed blanket goals for all students. Evidently, the Obama Administration believes this new approach will speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students.
Officials in the area surrounding the nation’s capital took the bull by the horns, setting specific race-based goals for the next five years, even though some parents view it as a form of prejudice. The plan sets goals according to demographics. For instance the reading proficiency level at an almost exclusively black school in an impoverished area is expected to be much lower than an already high-performing magnet school across the city. One D.C. parent calls the plan “disgraceful.”
Lowering academic standards for minorities may seem like a contradiction for an administration that has vowed to end the “educational inequities” long suffered by blacks and Latinos in the U.S. In fact, earlier this year the DOE issued civil rights equity data to makes this argument by, among other things, revealing that minorities have less access to rigorous high school curricula. Teachers in schools that serve minorities also tend to get less pay, according to the DOE’s findings.
Last spring the agency published a report that essentially said America’s progress is impossible if Hispanics keep lagging in education. That’s because their success is of “immediate and long term importance” to the U.S. economy, according to the report, which vowed to enhance opportunities for the “Latino community.” There was no mention of lowering academic standards as a way to achieve this goal, however.
So, if you’re one of those who match up with the demographic group with the lower standards,
will your diploma be worth more or less than it would if all standards were the same?
/rhetorical question
Just ensuring a future underclass of Democrat voters, who will vote for freebies as the wealth is redistributed by their masters.
If we have to lower the standard for blacks...than Jefferson was right the first time....
Weren’t the arguments FOR school integration so everyone would have an “equal chance”?
If you separate the cirriculum, you may as well go back to separate schools...same difference.
Are they finally ADMITTING that Blacks do NOT achieve because they don't attend classes, are more worried about drugs and gangs, what crime they'll next commit, etc., than trying to better their lot in life by LEARNING SKILLS? THIS should be trumpeted by the Romney Team as how The Messiah thinks of Blacks...sub-par achievers, and we'll keep giving you Whitey's money, so don't worry about education getting you anywhere....
What will happen is that all diplomas in DC will get a devaluation
Are they saying that minorities are stupid?
They voted for Obama didn't they?
There are millions of blacks, hispanics and low income people that have succeeded in our country because they were offered a decent education. They had to compete on an even scale with all students.
Now it seems these liberal educators don't want to cater to just the students who want to learn, they want to lower the standard to pass students who don't want to learn.
They would like to admit these things but cannot bring themselves to do so. Even less, they don't want to admit the real reason which is that they believe that blacks are intellectually, morally and racially inferior.
Yes, but they are not saying it in so straightforward a manner.
“I am Shocked! Shocked, I say.”
Not so long ago a Washington DC public high school graduate sued or tried to sue the DC Board of Ed. A straight A student and valedictorian he discovered after his first year in college (how he got there is another story) that he was ill prepared for ANY college level course. All the praise and inflated grades bestowed upon him to elevate his self-esteem had less than ZERO value in the almost real world.
Funny that home rule thing. Before home rule, DC public schools ranked very high nationally, most notably having one of the highest minority public HS graduation rates.
Now the joke among local educators is “a degree from DC means Don’t Count.”
Insuring a big Dem base for generations....
Insuring a big Dem base for generations....
This is to guarantee that new generations of minorities will get sub-standard educations so they will be easier to herd on to the democrat plantation.
Dat’s sho’ ‘nuff one way to keep dem blacks on de Democrat massa’s plantation, yes suh! I’se gwine vote fo’ Obama dis yeah too!
It’s not just DC, and it has been going on for a while. A business partner had worked at a refinery overseas, with his family living there and the children going to private schools. He arrived back Stateside, in a suburb that supposedly had highly rated public schools. So he and his wife get their children enrolled, and were aghast to find them assigned to the “slow track”. The reason? They were black. The parents fought this, and were successful. All the children wound up getting at least masters degrees in the hard sciences. They also got a good look at “liberal” racism.
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