We have previously discussed the continued failing of the public schools in preparing African American students for college or the workforce. I have specifically discussed the horrific figures coming out of Baltimore despite being one of the top districts in terms of per capita spending. Recent data now offers another chilling statistic: 41 percent of students in the Baltimore system have a 1.0 (D) GPA or less.
Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. Keep in mind that this is almost half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore.
What astonishes me is the lack of criticism of the school and political leadership of these major cities who have failed the African American community for decades. It is hard to imagine how the school system could possibly do worse while receiving some of the highest levels of federal and state expenditures per student.
This is not due to a lack of funding or support. It is a catastrophic failure that is not being addressed in the media despite occurring annually in cities like New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and other media hubs.
How much will be spent indoctrinating those students into CRT?
Off subject but I can’t help it. The funny thing is that they gave her the hat for the photo and then they took it back. https://twitter.com/MattWolking/status/1333241066984759296/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1333241066984759296%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fpolitics%2Fresurfaced-photo-psaki-biden-soviet-union. Talk about a useful idiot.
Only American politicians wear the Hammer and Sickle these days. The Russians have suffered enough and are over it.
It is not in the interest of many politicians to foster an educated public who have learned the value and method of critical thinking, so sincere effort by such politicians to improve the quality of public education is hardly to be expected.
It is not in the interest of many politicians to foster an educated public
Beggers are far easier to control.
Which politicians? Towns do not really have politicians per se because when everybody knows your history and can talk to you at church or in the grocery store, it’s hard to be a politician. If you mean at the federal level, I am inclined to agree. NCLB was a disaster. As is everything that came after.
What? No 4.0 for the Blacks as Victims course?
The schools and teachers unions are only a minority contributor. 70% of lower income black children (inner city mostly), are born to single parents (CDC Vital Statistics). 60% grow up with no father in the home. (US Census).
And we are SURPRISED at these statistics?
PRIVATIZATION
IRREVOCABLE UNION DECERTIFICATION
ELIMINATION OF THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL COMMUNIST DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
ELIMINATION OF THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL COMMUNIST DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
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Article 1, Section 8
Omission and, thereby, exclusion of any power or authority of Congress to regulate education.
A comprehensive absence of authority to regulate education; and a constitutional immunity of citizens against dictatorial regulation of education.
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The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
“…courts…must…declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
“…men…do…what their powers do not authorize, [and] what they forbid.”
“[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing … To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
– Alexander Hamilton
Wow George, you really want to clean house.
It is not I, you fool!
If it is a George, that George is George Washington et al.
Listen hard; you’ll hear.
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“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
– Declaration of Independence, 1776
Yet teachers unions pay politicians to oppose school choice, charter schools, and homeschooling.
They seek to trap students in failing schools. They oppose meritocracy in hiring and firing, and teacher salaries.
They’ve been told repeatedly that the science does not support blended learning or whole language, yet schools across the country cling to this failed literacy approach. This yields students who can’t read at grade level. If these struggling students don’t have opportunities in life after graduation, it’s not because a white cis gendered heteronormative colonialist man of the patriarchy stands in their way. It’s not because systemic racism bars their progress. It’s because they aren’t learning how to read or calculate math in schools. It’s because children of single mothers statistically struggle academically. They’re born into poverty, in high crime neighborhoods. They don’t have homework help. They go to schools where peer pressure is strong against raising your hand or studying hard. School hallways are more dangerous in some schools than many back alleys at midnight across the country. They’re more likely to join a gang, commit crimes, go to jail, and/or be killed.
Yet what does the Left do? Oppose school choice. Ignore high rates of violence in schools and claim that the accompanying high rates of discipline, suspension, or expulsion are racist. They don’t demand more of the kids; they lower the bar. Without any ability to discipline, administrators helplessly watch The Lord of the Flies play out in the hallways.
The best teachers typically don’t want to live in high crime neighborhoods to teach at schools with high rates of violence. They don’t want to commute there, either. And if the best of the best teachers in the nation felt a vocation, a testimony, to serve in those schools, they’d be paid the same as any other teacher with the same seniority. They certainly wouldn’t be paid commensurate with the progress of their students, with added hazard pay. Tenure would protect the teachers who sit there, no better than hockey pucks. That’s not systemic racism. It’s not the patriarchy. It’s not colonialism. It’s self preservation. Teachers don’t want to die, or get beat up, in high crime schools. They don’t want to raise their own families in high crime neighborhoods. And they don’t want to spend 6 hours commuting there and back from safer neighborhoods.
What works? Conservative values, which is why these values have been taught to kids generation after generation. Stay in school. Stay out of trouble. Wait to have kids until you’re married. Men, provide for your children and their mother. Common sense.
If you want to increase the caliber of the education in high crime neighborhoods:
1. Begin an information campaign urging the benefits of the nuclear family.
2. INCREASE law enforcement to combat crime.
3. All the energy of BLM has accomplished is destroying black neighborhoods with violence, arson, looting, and racism. Turn that energy into breaking the hold of gangs over neighborhoods.
4. Never, ever riot again. It drives out jobs. Who would open a business where riots occur?
5. Punish shoplifting. Reverse the Democrat trend of not prosecuting shoplifting, and for increasing the threshold of felony shoplifting. Who’s going to open a business if shoplifters are going to quickly drive them out of business? You want JOBS in these neighborhoods, which means it has to be safe for businesses to operate.
6. Clamp down hard on violence in schools. Put a metal detector at every entrance and search every backpack if you have to. Schools have got to be safe for students and teachers.
7. Starting in middle school, discuss the statistical poor outcomes for single mothers and their children in school assemblies. Kids should know the science on outcomes of various life choices. Compare and contrast a woman who has kids out of wedlock, and a woman who studies hard, graduates high school, and waits to have kids until she’s married, along with women who become CEOs, doctors, or lawyers. Give examples of people who came from very humble origins and succeeded – Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell.
8. Make schools follow the science of reading. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
So Karen S. Is promoting indoctrination of children and supports dictating how people should live their lives.
Because it’s…conservative values, values that people should be indoctrinated with and everything will magically fall into place. No more gays, interracial marriage, jobs that pay enough just so daddy can pay for everything and mommy stay home and gossip with the other mommies busy raising children and cooking and cleaning. And all the children will go back do reading their abc’s and 123’s.
Let’s not forget that it would be a crime to have unwed mothers again and ostracize them for their dirty deed, including the child that was once so valuable now it’s a burden on society.
Svelaz:
Don’t misunderstand or misrepresent me.
I said:
“7. Starting in middle school, discuss the statistical poor outcomes for single mothers and their children in school assemblies. Kids should know the science on outcomes of various life choices. Compare and contrast a woman who has kids out of wedlock, and a woman who studies hard, graduates high school, and waits to have kids until she’s married, along with women who become CEOs, doctors, or lawyers. Give examples of people who came from very humble origins and succeeded – Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell.”
Provide the statistics. Go through cause and effect. Teach them how to think.
In this day and age, no teenage girl should think unprotected sex or having kids out of wedlock is a great idea.
I never said anything about criminalizing single motherhood, or that they should be ostracized. We all live in glass houses. We need to inform kids about the statistical consequences of life choices. I never said all women should be stay at home mothers. I said men need to provide for their children and their mother. That means don’t deposit children with various women and then run out on them, leaving the women to pay for the upbringing of their children. A woman can’t make the same career choices if she’s a sole provider with zero help. She can’t keep taking sick time when her 3 kids alternate getting sick during cold and flu season. If she’s working, then the man can alternate taking sick and vacation time to help take care of them. A man who keeps getting women pregnant and running out on them can work as much overtime as he wants without having to worry about picking up the kids from school or daycare, or when the babysitter has to go home. If he has no personal responsibilities, he can live at home with his mother or cash with friends, playing video games, unconcerned about the price of diapers and child care. Why should men have no responsibility to their children or the women who bear them?
Your comment was rather disparaging against stay at home mothers, and glossed over the responsibly and need for fathers.
Schools are also supposed to teach the consequences of doing drugs as a natural part of health class. Provide information on how many homeless people do drugs. Show the progression of the “Faces of Meth”, so they can see how people’s health drastically declines on the drug by their sequential arrest photos.
Indoctrination would include teaching kids that one political party is better than the other, or misrepresenting world or national history.
Conservative values include not doing drugs, not committing crimes, being responsible, being on time, and taking care of your kids.
Which one of those do you think will not help lead to a middle class life? Coincidentally, these conservative values are statistically likely to produce a middle class life. Strangely, making the opposite choices is associated with poverty.
Karen,
I agree with some of the things in your list.
However, this is a rather broad statement that likely only reflects the largest districts in Democrat-controlled areas or at the state level:
“Yet teachers unions pay politicians to oppose school choice, charter schools, and homeschooling. They seek to trap students in failing schools. They oppose meritocracy in hiring and firing, and teacher salaries. They’ve been told repeatedly that the science does not support blended learning or whole language, yet schools across the country cling to this failed literacy approach.”
Many states have pretty lenient homeschool laws. I could see NY being pretty strict, though. I doubt the teachers unions ‘seek to trap students in failing schools’. I do not think that is their motive. Regarding whole language, thankfully, that has shifted back towards phonics. I know of several districts in different states that are using a phonics-based approach called Fundations. I’m not sure I like all the elements of this program in comparison to the phonics-based education I received as a kid, but it is better than whole language by a long shot!
Prairie Rose, true, it is indeed most keenly felt in Blue States. Where I live in CA, enrollment in charter schools was capped at pre-pandemic levels. This was because students were draining away from public schools during the pandemic. Charter school and homeschool programs had spent years perfecting online learning, or what the public schools call “distance learning.” Public schools for the most part had never bothered to create such a system, and they struggled. When students left for charter schools in droves, the teachers union objected. By capping charter school enrollment to pre-pandemic levels, it trapped students in public schools.
We were lucky to be able to homeschool. Yet homeschooling is also in the teachers unions’ crosshairs.
If Democrats hold power at the federal level for long enough, especially if they ever successfully expand and pack SCOTUS, you watch. They’ll go after charter schools and homeschooling nationwide.
The phonics-based approach is typically blended learning, which is based on whole language, with a little phonics thrown in. They don’t spend enough time teaching kids how to decode words, including learning the rules of the pronunciation of the languages behind the root words. It’s better than whole language, but not by much.
I’ve posted the link to this article a few times. It’s rather lengthy, but there is an audio version embedded. You could let it play while driving so you don’t have to read the entire thing. I’m passionate about literacy, so have followed the science of reading for years. I can emphatically tell you that not even the universities that teach the teachers are following the science of literacy. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
There was long an assumption that children would instinctively learn how to read, like they learn how to speak. No one has to explain to a child how to move their lips and tongue to speak. The child naturally mimics the people around him, gradually comprehending spoken language. There is no such instinct for written language. Simply reading more books, or buying more readers, will not make a proficient reader. Most children need to be taught how to decode words, although some will figure it out for themselves. The ones who don’t don’t read at grade level, and become lifelong poor readers, like the man in this story (https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153). This affects their performance in math and science, too.
My own father taught me how to read when I was very young, because he was disgusted with how the schools were not teaching kids how to sound out words. He viewed with contempt the fuddled way the schools taught my older sibling. I taught my own child how to read because the schools STILL used the discredited blended learning technique. They STILL have kids look at the picture to try to guess words.
This failure is a legacy of slavery and white supremacy. Once we pay every black person in the country $6 trillion dollars, the problem will be solved. Hallelujah, Go Down Moses, and Let my People Go!
Dirtydog, I heard it was $14 trillion. And I still don’t think that will fix what’s broken.
When one is paid to do a job and they don’t do it, they should be fired.
These stats are demonstrative of what happens to unionized bureaucratic monopolizes. They have dominion over the educational system nationwide. They have fostered the removal of the basics, reading, writing and math, and even postulated that math is racist in nature, replacing some of the instructions with CRT, and other absurd notions. The only course for correction is banning unions and placing teachers as at will employees. Unions have no place in any government bureaucracy, local, state or federal. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote that the process of collective bargaining had “insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.” How can the citizenry trust any negotiations between government bureaucratic management and a government employee union?
Keep em stupid and pregnant and feed them the swill that you are there to take care of them. This is plan one, two and three. Plan four is to go into their neighborhoods to help them with the harvest of their vote. Keep em stupid so they can’t figure it out. It’s been the tried and true process since 1964. Why change the process when it’s working so well.
I was living in New Orleans LA when I first saw first hand the Charter School debate.
For those poor and minorities, that was only their real chance of getting out of poverty.
There was a long waiting list to get in.
Truly sad.
Except about 40% of schools in New Orleans are getting Ds or Fs (and New Orleans moved to an all charter school model). Ok, that’s better than 70% failing, but it is still terrible. Kids doing well switch into better schools while kids doing poorly either stay in poorly performing schools or move laterally.
Ball Ta More! Ball Ta more!
Greatest city in Alabam!
Clear across this great big land…
There ain’t no grave like Baltimore!
“I have specifically discussed the horrific figures coming out of Baltimore despite being one of the top districts in terms of per capita spending. Recent data now offers another chilling statistic: 41 percent of students in the Baltimore system have a 1.0 (D) GPA or less.”
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You want real racism? This will show you real racism and it’s insidious. The African-American leadership of Baltimore has failed these kids along with their parents. This is child abuse pure and simple and the Dims don’t want to talk about it.
Democrats rule! Show me a large urban school district and I’m certain their “numbers” are similar to those of Baltimore. Democrats spend the big bucks .. awhile inner-city youngsters experience no educational benefits. It’s just what the Ds want: minority youngsters remain victims of lousy educational systems.
Gallup poll percentage of Americans that trust Western News media 21% (A bit high me thinks)
Two factors at work: (1) Lefties cynically use blacks for political purposes, but don’t do much for them; and (2) blacks refuse to demand what they deserve (the vast majority of these unfortunate students are black).
I say Lefties because the teachers’ unions and Baltimore politicians are overwhelmingly Democrats.
Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democrat, the same party that led them to this shameful outcome.
And things will not improve until blacks demand what they deserve, good education.
Unfortunately, many black leaders focus on defunding the police, reparations, and “voting rights” (the red meat that Biden et al mendaciously dangle in front of blacks).
Blacks need and deserve a good education; until they get that education, their kids are condemned to the underclass.
Jason Reily’s book “Please Stop Helping Us” is a great read along the lines of your comments.
Monument,
“And things will not improve until blacks demand what they deserve, good education.”
I agree, but I also do not see very many people in disadvantaged areas speaking up. I suspect they do not know what they do not know.
Dr. Ben Carson’s mom was able to see how rich people chose to live because she cleaned people’s homes for a living. She consequently started modeling her household along those lines–off went the TV! Read books from the library! And do a book report each week!
One can not emphasize enough the recent comments by a former North Korean immigrant woman currently a student and a top American University. In order to plumb the depths of what she claims can be condensed. Americans are educated what to think not how, more akin to merely getting a dead-end job. Remember the policies and procedures of the IRS (5lb vol version ) only benefit those who operate their own companies everyone else is required to bend over… for a Covid shot.
The entire district should be dissolved and each family given a voucher to enroll in a private, parochial, charter, or cyber school of their choice.
It could also be broken into like 5-10 smaller districts. This would make them less ‘political’ because people would know each other to a greater extent.
That is so sad. Just throw more money