Black Education Disaster

[Armando Ramos]

The melting pot looks like a garbage bin rather than a tropical salad at a five star restaurant, eh?:rolleyes:

Don't know if I would phrase it exactly that way but...um, yeah....

According to Robert Weissberg, whose book "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" forms the basis for this article by Pat Buchanan, the key factors are cognitive ability and disposition.

In recent testing Shanghai China was first in reading, science and math; the US was 14th, 17th and 25th, respectively. Mexico was dead last in reading.

African-American students outperform their African counterparts, just as Asian-Americans outperform their Asian counterparts except those in Shanghai. The issue then is not the schools, which aren't the complete failures most of us would have suspected.

Rather, the clear implication is that if you want better performing schools, import better performing students and not a load of disinterested dumbasses.

Pat Buchanan
Who Owns the Future?

"That speaks about who is going to be leading tomorrow."

So said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Every three years, the Paris-based OECD holds its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the reading, math and science skills of 15-year-olds in developing and developed countries. Gurria was talking of the results of the 2009 tests.

Sixty-five nations competed. The Chinese swept the board.

The schools of Shanghai-China finished first in math, reading and science. Hong Kong-China was third in math and science. Singapore, a city-state dominated by overseas Chinese, was second in math, fourth in science.

Only Korea, Japan and Finland were in the hunt.

And the U.S.A.? America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math, producing the familiar quack-quack.

"This is an absolute wake-up call for America," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investment in education."

But the "brutal truth" is that we invest more per pupil than any other country save Luxembourg, and we are broke. And a closer look at the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths.

True, East Asians -- Chinese, Koreans, Japanese -- are turning in the top scores in all three categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

But, looking down the New York Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the old Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia.

And in Europe as in Asia, the northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy, Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America's public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America's schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science and math between Anglo and Asian students and black and Hispanic students.

And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.

The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

Which brings us to "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools," a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately "refuse to confront the obvious truth."

"America's educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today's schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement."

In the public and parochial schools of the 1940s and 1950s, kids were pushed to the limits of their ability, then pushed harder. And when they stopped learning, they were pushed out the door.

Writes Weissberg: "To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America's educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean."

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school's success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class -- not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

A nation weary of wasting billions on unctuous educators who never deliver what they promise may be ready to hear some hard truths.

---

Along similar lines, here's an article authored by Robert Weissberg himself. He talks about the rampant racially-based academic fraud that permeates degree mills like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:

The College Diploma Fraud
December 21, 2010
By Robert Weissberg

For more than a half-century, government has tried to close racial gaps in educational attainment. Sad to say, those gaps have proven intractable. Nevertheless, the impulse remains as heartfelt as ever (perhaps due to its financially lucrative character), but the emphasis is now shifting from actual learning to equality of graduation rates. President Obama has spoken of adding 5 million graduates to the workforce by 2020, and credential-mania is now all the rage. This shift is a disaster in the making; imparting knowledge is commendable, but just handing out diplomas is harmful deception. A cynic might aver that the shift from knowledge to graduation rates is a tacit admission that the gap-closing quest is futile.

Consider a recent Washington Post story, "Md's Towson University conquers 'graduation gap.'" The story explains how Towson is now among the tiny few that have equalized graduation across blacks, whites, and Hispanics. The article's tone was clearly celebratory. Meanwhile, a report prepared by The Education Trust (cited in the Post story) that examines the topic more broadly insisted that equal graduation rates "would be a very big step in putting our country on a path to a better and more equitable future."

The tip-off to this educational chicanery is the silence regarding actual learning, as if the physical piece of paper signified educational competency. There is nothing about what these graduates majored in, their class rank and future academic success in graduate schools, professional certification exams scores, or future employment. Having the piece of paper is, apparently, the great accomplishment.

University outsiders seldom grasp the ease of manipulating graduation statistics when deception is officially tolerated. Critically, this sham is almost invisible to outsiders. I cannot for sure say how Towson University achieved these happy numbers, but in nearly four decades of university teaching, I have personally witnessed multiple ruses, and my colleagues often confirmed my observations. So let me offer what might be called "A Guide to Schools Desperate to Increase Minority Graduation Rates."

First, offer special, unadvertised "minority only" courses. Thanks to today's charitable standard grading curve, nearly all enrollees will now receive As and Bs to eradicate Ds and Fs elsewhere. This just extends the "athletes only" courses popular to sustain student-athlete eligibility. At the University of Illinois-Urbana, where I taught for 28 years, such "minority only" courses paralleled multiple introductory courses in varied fields and superficially appeared to be bona fide courses. Though designed to award gift grades, they still counted in accumulated graduation credit. In a pinch, universities are free to award full academic credit to de facto remedial courses targeting unprepared minority students.

Second, supply generous official rescues to wipe-out failures, and even absolve students of blatant cheating (often rampant thanks to the internet) in interventions totally invisible to those who suspect bogus statistics. Some schools now even allow failing grades to be expunged after the final exam. I recall one struggling student who submitted a paper purchased on the internet who accidentally included the $25 receipt from "Myprofessorsucks.com." Though the drop deadline had long passed, he was excused from the class with no penalty thanks to the intercession of the department's official advisor. I know of another school where written permission from the school's president was required before a black student could be failed. In a sense, many minority students are often treated as if they were members of an endangered species.

Third, accept no-questions-asked transfer credit regardless of the source. Again, this is a carryover from keeping athletes eligible and is nearly impossible to detect without scrutinizing specific course syllabi to certify equivalence. Moreover, each institution decides the number of transfer credits permitted to count toward the degree. At the University of Illinois when I taught there, one quarter of one's accumulated credits could come from outside, be they from Harvard or the local admission-hungry community college.

Fourth, steer academically troubled students to certain courses, especially those taught by ideologically sympathetic instructors who virtually guarantee top grades, or at least courses where nobody fails. Such offerings are certainly known to counselors, but even ordinary courses now have inflated grades, so failure requires gross incompetence (for grade inflation in general, see here). Or, if a hard-nosed grader teaches a required course, either pressure him or her to relax the curve or just put a more generous grader in charge. Ironically, relying on student evaluation to promote "good teaching" encourages easy grading and, as a side benefit, helps boost minority graduation rates.

Fifth, develop entire majors or at least individual courses whose tacit justification is to supply easy grades to struggling minority students. These constitute the familiar grievance-flavored group identity curriculum -- Black Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, and the like (for Towson's identity politics courses, see here). Here one's own identity is the unchallenged academic resource, and what instructor is brave enough to invalidate that firsthand knowledge? Now add majors and courses designed for college athletes -- courses in sports management, recreation, and even leisure studies -- and the Mickey Mouse menu is an all-you-can-eat buffet of soft academic irrelevance.

Finally, surround minority students with a coterie of role models, mentors, and counselors to guide them through their rocky path toward the diploma. Further add individual tutors, centers to help with paper-writing, and more general classes on how to succeed in college. Towson offers a welcome-to-college class that teaches such things as decision-making skills (see here). While at Illinois, I witnessed a steady parade of pre-college "bridge" programs, some of which paid prospective students to acquire essential college skills.

With all of these tools available, it is no wonder that some energetic schools have successfully improved black graduation rates. But whether these concocted diplomas mean much is another story. My own sense is that these graduates have been hoodwinked by self-serving college officials. That today's college degrees, regardless of the recipient's race, are increasingly "manufactured" versus reflecting real learning is strongly suggested by a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Specifically, contemporary "college graduates" are increasingly employed in positions once occupied by high school graduates. For example, in 1992, 17.6% of all college graduates were in positions classified as "noncollege level jobs." By 2008, this percentage had doubled to 35.2%. In 1992, some 119,000 waiters and waitresses had college degrees; by 2008, this number had soared to 318,000. No doubt, unprepared black students who owe their diplomas to intense institutional effort and deception have fared even worse in today's difficult job market. In a sense, America's long quest for both educational equality and excellence is being satisfied by a combination of gullibility, linguistic trickery, and craven opportunism

Ill-prepared black students are the real losers in this deception, and one can only speculate why their liberal "friends" tolerate the dishonesty. Many would have been better-advised to enroll in a trade school and acquire a well-paid, marketable skill. In the long run, if a college degree is the aim, a "tough love" strategy of requiring passing arduous courses with modest outside help would be more beneficial. Surely President Obama has encountered these subterfuges in his academic career and must realize that calling for more and more diplomas will only increase the supply of college-educated waiters.

Some exceptions aside, granting ever more college diplomas only signifies the power of today's universities to counterfeit genuine accomplishment. Particularly worrisome is that many of these graduates have been trained for dependency. Picture these graduates navigating a cruel world deprived of role models, mentors, counselors, sympathetic evaluators, resource centers, pre-job bridge programs, and bosses unwilling to substitute ego-enhancing identity politics for difficult work.

Let us be clear. It is uncertain just what these Towson graduates actually learned, though we suspect that if the accomplishment were real, these upbeat reports would have celebrated it. They may even succeed in demanding jobs. Far more likely, however, is that this celebration masks a politically driven charade to demonstrate progress to those who happily accept outward appearances over substance.