Racism: is there anything it can’t do?
On the 60th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that led to school desegregation in the U.S., State Education Commissioner John King on Wednesday spoke about the struggles that minorities and low-income students still face in the nation’s educational system.
In his remarks at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, King said racial and socioeconomic disparities among students have an effect on academic achievement. He said only 15 percent of black and Latino high school graduates are ready for college-level work, while half of white students are sufficiently prepared. “Equality is central to our identities as Americans,” King said. “But for all its power as an idea, equality remains elusive for far too many people of color in New York and across the country.”
King cited a study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles that named New York as home to “the most segregated public schools in the country” -— racially and economically. He said while schools are no longer overtly segregated by race, district lines often divide children along racial or socioeconomic boundaries.
“We should not be able to point to neighborhoods in New York where one public school serves mostly poor students and achieves painfully discouraging results while another public school just a few blocks away serves mostly affluent students and puts them on the path to success,” he said.
King said Common Core educational standards are an attempt to close the achievement gap between minority and low-income students relative to their peers. He urged parents and educators to not back off from their commitment to Common Core.
“This is about taking responsibility for educating every single child no matter what his or her race, background or economic status,” the commissioner said. “By retreating from accountability and allowing children at risk to slip through the cracks, advocates of lower standards deny us the talents of all Americans.”
Common Core is about centralized control over propaganda dissemination and, in the end, regression to the (largely progressive) mean. It’s a radical egalitarian answer to the question, how can we make everyone equally dumb while patting ourselves on the back for instituting educational “fairness” and closing the “education inequality gap”?
To oppose such a one-size-fits-all curriculum isn’t racist. It’s prudent.
What’s racist is Obama’s refusal to back vouchers that would help break poor, mostly black students out of the cycle of substandard education, followed by diminished employment opportunity and reliance on government.
But before anyone gets angry at me for saying such a thing, let me just note that I’m talking about Obama’s white half engaging in willful racism. Naturally.
That being said, all this is moot: because both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the presumptive nominees for the 1992 2016 presidential election, support Common Core, and will happily take up the charge that those who oppose it hate children and love racism.
Common Core, like amnesty, is an act of love. Just so long as it’s kept away from private schools. Because the scions of political families need to have a leg up on the commoners somehow, right?
(h/t weasel zippers)
chris christie is another chubby republican p.o.s. what lurvs him some common core
Presuming that a unified curriculum were a desirable thing, the mere having of a curriculum does nothing in and of itself. Teachers are required to instruct to the curriculum, and students are required to receive the instruction. Not all teachers are of equal capacity, neither are all students.
The calculus of the Common Core die-hards seems to be that given a uniform input, uniform outcome is guaranteed (where have we heard that before??). They completely neglect the inherent disparity of ability among teachers and among students. They think Common Core is equivalent to Good Education.
It’s just like the Obamacare presumption that Having Insurance is the same as Good Healthcare. Just like the mere possession of a Medicaid card never cured anything, tossing out a book using Singapore Math doesn’t learn up nobody.
Should be redubbed “common whore”.
Isn’t if fun watching an advantaged economic class transform itself into a privileged social order?
T. Jefferson: Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, August 4, 1818 (The Rockfish Gap Report)
Just so’s we have some sort of nominal republican educational idea in hand, even if taking nominal republican advisedly on account that Jefferson could prove to be a bit queer on these grounds.
Could it be that smart parents “of color” got their kids out of these bad neighborhood schools just like the smarter white parents did?
So we’ve gone from a paradigm of detecting and exposing implicit crypto racism through verious questionable methods to broadly theorizing about a universe made up entirely of polymorphic omni-racism.
Aside from its obvious structural deficiencies, and the fact that it IS a Trojan Horse for propaganda, the roll out, in New York State, of Common Core Algebra this year, was a Hindenburg-like disaster. As it was happening, Mr. King was quoted as saying, “We will teach our way through this.” For real. “We will teach our way through this.” Imagine that.
I know how big a disaster it was/is, because I had to try to teach it. The evil part of me is rooting for the worst possible results on the upcoming state exam so those that shoved it down the throats of administrators, teachers, parents and students can feel some upchuck rising in their own gorges at the catastrophe they instigated.