Zone1 How to Close the “Achievement Gap” in Los Angeles Schools, by Mary Morrison

[Woodznutz]

Paul Simon didn't help.
"When I think about all the crap I learned in High School, it's a wonder I can even think at all..."

 

[Hector12]

Not enough older battle-hardened no-nonsense teachers like I had.

A no-nonsense teacher who demands hard work and excellence from black students will be fired.

 

[Unkotare]

Those that can, do.
Those that can't, teach.

Those who "do" were taught by teachers.

 

[Unkotare]

A no-nonsense teacher who demands hard work and excellence from black students will be fired.

Bullshit.

 

[MarathonMike]

Each year, we teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are excitedly told about “breakthroughs” in “new” teaching methods that are “brain-based,” “research-based,” “data-based,” and/or “standards-based” and that will, once and for all, close the achievement gaps between blacks and Hispanics, and Asians and whites...

I don’t know a single teacher who does not dread and despise these so-called “PD-days.” At the first meeting in September we are invariably told that the teaching methods we learned the previous year aren’t working. Test scores have not improved, so we are to “toss out any and all manuals” we may have lying around, and to get ready for everything to change...

In these PC-heavy sessions, any mention of IQ or racial differences would be heresy. Educational dogma requires that we must never question the following:

1. IQ is meaningless. (I would note that IQ testing has been banned in California schools since the 1970s because blacks score badly on them. Therefore, there are no objective measures for who should be in gifted or special-education classes.)...

3. There are no racial differences in behavior, focus, or drive. Students are never to blame if they misbehave, fail to study, or can’t understand the curriculum.

4. Unequal outcomes and low test scores are strictly the fault of teachers and schools. This is why more money must be “invested” in teacher training and “professional development.”...

Some of these tried-and-failed schemes have been recycled, given new names, and reintroduced as the latest innovation. Teachers whisper to each other, “We’ve already tried that and it didn’t work.”

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In her much longer essay Mary Morrison explains that nothing works.

In his 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen predicted that nothing would work. Why do we keep wasting teachers' time and tax payers' money on delusions about intrinsic individual and average racial intellectual equality?

When has a method ever been developed that turns children who score poorly on IQ tests into competent scholars who can be trained to be managers and professionals?

I'm not sure if it's low IQ as much as low expectations and/or lack of support from the parent or parents.

 

[Hector12]

I'm not sure if it's low IQ as much as low expectations and/or lack of support from the parent or parents.

It is all of that, but it is mainly low IQ.

 

[Woodznutz]

Those who "do" were taught by teachers.

Teachers can only take so much credit for what people do in life.

 

[Woodznutz]

I'm not sure if it's low IQ as much as low expectations and/or lack of support from the parent or parents.

Most kids can't see far enough ahead to see the value of education.

 

[Lisa558]

I agree. If I were a teacher, I'd want to see the fruits of my labor reflected in the bright awakening of my students. But if they were loud; routinely late; disruptive; and unreceptive, I'd get the sense that I'm simply wasting my time. Teachers are human.

The problem is that the students run the schools because everyone is afraid to discipline them. Especially the inner city schools. Many of them are closer to zoos than centers of education.

The inner public schools are a zoo. I worked across the street from an elementary school, and I timed my lunch break to avoid their recess. Some of those obnoxious 11- and 12-year old boys were taller and stronger than me (well, obviously stronger) and i didn’t like walk past them as they yell racist slurs and sexual innuendo against a white middle-aged woman. Absolutely disgusting.

 

[Lisa558]

Those who "do" were taught by teachers.

And those who murder, rape, assault, steal, etc., were also taught by teachers.

 

[Hector12]

The inner public schools are a zoo. I worked across the street from an elementary school, and I timed my lunch break to avoid their recess. Some of those obnoxious 11- and 12-year old boys were taller and stronger than me (well, obviously stronger) and i didn’t like walk past them as they yell racist slurs and sexual innuendo against a white middle-aged woman. Absolutely disgusting.

A Conversation with Professor Arthur Jensen of Berkeley

Arthur Jensen: Where the differences in basic characteristics are not conspicuous, as in the case of Asians and whites, and when persons can fit in and do the same kinds of jobs and do them as well as anyone else, it may work. See, there are blacks who fit in this way too — who do all right.

But the black population in this country is in a sense burdened by the large number of persons who are at a level of g that is no longer very relevant to a highly industrialized, technological society. Once you get below IQs of 80 or 75, which is the cut-off for mental retardation in the California School System, children are put into special classes. These persons are not really educable up to a level for which there’s any economic demand. The question is, what do you do about them? They have higher birth-rates than the other end of the distribution.

People are shocked and disbelieving when you tell them that about one in four blacks in our population are in that category — below 75.

-------------

When Aid For Families with Dependent Children was introduced during the New Deal of the 1930's unmarried women with illegitimate children were denied coverage.

The War on Poverty extended coverage to them. In the process it nurtured the creation of an unemployable black underclass, the members of which supplement their welfare checks with the gains from criminal activity. Their children cannot be educated, and violently interfere with the educations of the few students in black majority schools who are trying to learn.

For reasons I have difficulty understanding it has become dangerous to tell unflattering facts about a large percentage of the Negro race.

 

[Woodznutz]

Bullshit.

"No-nonsense" teachers wouldn't put up with the school board's nonsense and would likely quit long before they are fired.

 

[Hector12]

Bullshit.

This ^ is typical of your comments. You seem incapable of posting any evidence of intelligence, learning, and civility.

 

[Unkotare]

And those who murder, rape, assault, steal, etc., were also taught by teachers.

Taught to do those things? Bullshit.

 

[Unkotare]

The inner public schools are a zoo. I worked across the street from an elementary school, and I timed my lunch break to avoid their recess. Some of those obnoxious 11- and 12-year old boys were taller and stronger than me (well, obviously stronger) and i didn’t like walk past them as they yell racist slurs and sexual innuendo against a white middle-aged woman. Absolutely disgusting.

You're afraid of 12 year olds? Grow up.

 

[Unkotare]

This ^ is typical of your comments. You seem incapable of posting any evidence of intelligence, learning, and civility.

Bullshit.

 

[Woodznutz]

You're afraid of 12 year olds? Grow up.

I would avoid inner city black 12 year olds.

 

[Lisa558]

A Conversation with Professor Arthur Jensen of Berkeley

Arthur Jensen: Where the differences in basic characteristics are not conspicuous, as in the case of Asians and whites, and when persons can fit in and do the same kinds of jobs and do them as well as anyone else, it may work. See, there are blacks who fit in this way too — who do all right.

But the black population in this country is in a sense burdened by the large number of persons who are at a level of g that is no longer very relevant to a highly industrialized, technological society. Once you get below IQs of 80 or 75, which is the cut-off for mental retardation in the California School System, children are put into special classes. These persons are not really educable up to a level for which there’s any economic demand. The question is, what do you do about them? They have higher birth-rates than the other end of the distribution.

People are shocked and disbelieving when you tell them that about one in four blacks in our population are in that category — below 75.

-------------

When Aid For Families with Dependent Children was introduced during the New Deal of the 1930's unmarried women with illegitimate children were denied coverage.

The War on Poverty extended coverage to them. In the process it nurtured the creation of an unemployable black underclass, the members of which supplement their welfare checks with the gains from criminal activity. Their children cannot be educated, and violently interfere with the educations of the few students in black majority schools who are trying to learn.

For reasons I have difficulty understanding it has become dangerous to tell unflattering facts about a large percentage of the Negro race.

If blacks could get cut their 72% out of wedlock rate - SHAMEFUL - in half, they would see a significant drop in the associated ills associated with it, primarily poverty and crime.

Now I’m not saying that every black is capable of college or professional-level work. But even at the 85 IQ level, people can squeak though high school and then get a training certificate in a trade. That, assuming they did not have two or so babies OOW, would bring them to at least the lower end of middle class.

It’s not rocket science.

 

[Unkotare]

I would avoid inner city black 12 year olds.

You need to grow a pair.

 

[Lisa558]

You're afraid of 12 year olds? Grow up.

Yes, a 12-year-old boy is capable of rendering me unconscious - at least those in the inner-city schools. I actually think some of them were 13 and 14, and just left behind.