Posted on 10/12/2016 5:12:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Detroit school students, represented by the Los Angeles-based public interest firm Public Counsel, filed suit last month against the state of Michigan, claiming a legal right to literacy based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Ninety-three percent of Detroit's predominantly black public school eighth-graders are not proficient in reading, and 96 percent are not proficient in mathematics. According to the lawsuit, "decades of State disinvestment in and deliberate indifference to Detroit schools have denied Plaintiff schoolchildren access to the most basic building block of education: literacy."
In terms of per-pupil expenditures, the state does not treat Detroit public school students any differently than it does other students. According to the Michigan Department of Education, the Detroit school district ranks 50th in state spending, at $13,743 per pupil. This is out of 841 total districts. That puts Detroit schools in the top 6 percent of per-pupil expenditures in the state. Discrimination in school expenditures cannot explain poor educational outcomes for black students in Detroit or anywhere else in the nation. Let's look at routinely ignored educational impediments in Detroit and elsewhere.
Annie Ellington, director of the Detroit Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, reported that 87 percent of the 1,301 Detroit public school students interviewed in a survey last year knew someone who had been killed, disabled or wounded by gun violence. According to an article published by the American Psychological Association, 80 percent of teachers surveyed nationally in 2011 had been victimized at school at least once during that school year or the prior year. Detroit public schools are plagued with the same problems of violence faced by other predominately black schools in other cities.
In Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. In February 2014, The Baltimore Sun reported that more than 300 Baltimore school staff members had filed workers' compensation claims during the previous fiscal year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job. A 1999 Michigan law requires school districts to expel any student in sixth grade or above who physically assaults a school employee. The Lansing Board of Education ignored the law and refused to expel four students for throwing chairs at an employee, slapping a teacher and punching another in the face. It took a Michigan Supreme Court ruling to get the board to enforce the law. The court said the law was enacted "specifically (to) protect teachers from assault and to assist them in more effectively performing their jobs."
Colin Flaherty, author of "Don't Make the Black Kids Angry," has compiled news stories and videos that show how black students target teachers for violence. He discusses some of it in his Jan. 12, 2015, American Thinker article, titled "Documented: Black Students Target Teachers for Violence" (http://tinyurl.com/l67857g). As a result of school violence and other problems, many teachers quit when June rolls around. Every year, Detroit loses about 5 percent of its teaching positions (135 teachers). According to a Detroit schools representative, substitutes, principals and other staffers must cover classes, a situation not unique to Detroit (http://tinyurl.com/p9sf2d9). In California, signing bonuses of $20,000, "combat pay," aren't enough to prevent teachers from leaving altogether or seeking out less violent schools.
The departments of Education and Justice have launched a campaign against disproportionate minority discipline rates, which show up in virtually every school district with significant numbers of black and Hispanic students. The possibility that students' behavior, not educators' racism, drives those rates lies outside the Obama administration's conceptual universe. Black people ought to heed the sentiments of Aaron Benner, a black teacher in a St. Paul, Minnesota, school who abhors the idea of different behavioral standards for black students. He says: "They're trying to pull one over on us. Black folks are drinking the Kool-Aid; this 'let-them-clown' philosophy could have been devised by the KKK." Personally, I can't think of a more racist argument than one that holds that disruptive, rude behavior and foul language are a part of black culture.
Here's my prediction: If the Michigan lawsuit is successful, it will line the pockets of Detroit's teaching establishment and do absolutely nothing for black academic achievement.
Walter Williams is an American treasure and hero.
That damnable bell IQ curve. It just gets in the way. All Africans are entitled to have 30 points added to their tested scores. I am Barack Obama by executive decree and I approve of this mandate.
And yesterday we are told Zero wants NASA to start “heading to Mars”. Too late, we have squandered the resources. Rats decided long ago they would rather breed generations of voters. That cow is out of the barn.
You can be sure the per pupil spending in the DPS district (in the top 6%) does not match the tax contributions coming from the district.
Where the light of truth is hidden, darkness reigns.
This is the “Banana Republic” that the Marxists (Hillary) have designated as the heritage for Americans.
The learner is responsible the learnin’
I could read before I went to school, because my parents read to me and taught me. No government needed. Maybe that’s something they could look into.
> Ninety-three percent of Detroit’s predominantly black public school eighth-graders are not proficient in reading
What have they been doing all that time that didn’t involve reading? Eight years of kindergarten??
I don’t have confidence in race as a determining factor. Make a good argument, but. Make a political argument, but.This suggest that there is a very strong cultural component. Which, given the very strong correlation of race and culture in this country, could explain a lot. They have similar issues in Britain, absent the racial connotations. The combination of cynicism about society with naïveté about government (i.e., socialism) is that toxic.
- The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100.
If Detroit hiered comptent reliable teachers.
If DET taught reading, writing and arithmetric,
If DET sad, To He~~ with all the Lolly-Crap PC Crap.
If the kids STUDIED,
If the Kisa said to HE~~ to all the gangs and did their Scholl assigned Home - Work,
*****
So you think all are the same? Try reading the Bell Curve. Do you also think a Border Collie is no more intelligent than a Bassett Hound? Have you checked out the accomplishments of an entire continent of Africans? BTW, Wikipedia is not some fountain of truth. Any rube can post as they wish.
That comparison is a formula for a race war. Worthy of the KKK, not of the Party of Lincoln. Yes and I know that Lincoln today would be rated a racist; I can remember having made easy assumptions in my teen years because certain people gave me trouble. But not all of them were black. By any means. My honest opinion is that society is imperfect because people are - all of us - imperfect.BTW, Wikipedia is not some fountain of truth.Colin Kapernik isn’t a jerk because he is (part) black; he’s a jerk because he is an individual jerk and also is - because of the history of racism (a natural tendency, and one which goes both ways) which put him in a position where it is easy to go with that flow. Society is imperfect because people are imperfect; government is (see the first page of Common Sense not merely imperfect but at best a necessary evil.
It would be one thing if blacks were the only “liberals” in the country, and if the exact same pathologies didn’t appear anywhere else (Britain) among whites.
Neither is any other nominally “objective” publication on matters bearing on politics. Some things are, at least relatively, divorced from that. If Wikipedia talks about the history of Intel processor model releases, I trust them. If Wikipedia talks about the definition of cynicism, it uses examples which do not match up with reality.Any "liberal” rube can post as they wish.
A conservative can post as he wishes - but only briefly, as I understand it.
No truth should be hidden under a veil of deception. The facts are the facts even if they are unpleasant. The KKK, SPLC, NAACP, BLM, Black Caucus, La Raza and so goes the list. Cover it all up with lies and what do you get?
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