Juan Williams begs the busing question
I shouldn’t have to think this hard, and it makes me suspicious.
Juan Williams begs the question in his analysis of “Little Rock 50 years later.” He laments Supreme Court decisions that reigned in busing and housing patterns have led to de facto segregation, decades after de jure discrimination was stomped out. Then comes what to me looks like sleight of hand:
This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences — half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school.
Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities. Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.”
The question begged is cause or effect. Are the home environment of the integrated families who are already doing better economically and socially themselves the real variable? Is it the superior facilities or instruction that makes the difference? Or is it integration per se — simply being around white people — that improves life chances?
Williams’ blanket statement cries out for qualification. I suspect that the research has been done and the answers are not to his liking. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to think this hard about his claim.
A drug-induced dream
The Soviet Union and Cuba are paradises, and Mao was a great statesman, according to a textbook until just recently used by the Brazilian government in eigth grade. Which they just canceled, much to the outrage of the “academic” author:
Without saying why, the Education Ministry said Wednesday it has stopped using “New Critical History” by Brazilian academic Mario Schmidt. The textbook has been distributed free since 2002 to nearly a million students.
Gee, let’s see if we can parse this mystery. Predictably, the book’s publisher faults conservatives. But what might they object to?
“New Critical History” speaks of Mao as “a great statesman and military commander” who “loved innumerable women and was loved by them.”
And killed innumerable men women and children in the cultural revolution, eh?
The book also describes the former Soviet Union as a country without unemployment, inflation or hunger.
“Free medicine, rent equal to the cost of three packs of cigarettes, great cities with no abandoned children,” [!] Schmidt wrote. “For us in the Third World, it’s almost a dream, isn’t it?”
Which is why it collapsed, right? Dream on dude.
The text also says that while some Cubans hope that U.S. investments will return once Fidel Castro is gone, “there’s a chance Cuba again will have the poor districts and abandoned children [again with the abandoned children. An obsession?] as in the time of Fulgencio Batista,” the rightist dictator whom Castro overthrew in 1959.
Whereas, right now, it’s a workers’ paradise.
There was a moment in 1989 when we thought Lenin would be finally buried — not just literally, but metaphorically. But the dream lives on in the backward minds of the backward teachers of a backward society.
What’s funnier than a school board on graft?
Paraphrasing Kissinger, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. Michelle Malkin has the lowdown on the small time crooks swaggering around with their big payoffs in the FBI sting. Don’t get me wrong. Some of this involves big time stuff–city mayors, etc.. And the culture of corruption on NJ seems to run deep indeed. But even still, the pettiness of it all is a riot:
On or about November 8, 2006, defendant McCORMICK was interviewed at the FBI office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the interview, defendant McCORMICK acknowledged that he had received the $3,500 wire transfer discussed in paragraph 13. In explaining why he had received these funds, defendant McCORMICK stated that he told Official 1 that he needed $2,000 to $3,000 to renovate his basement so that the Pleasantville Democratic Club had a place to hold its meetings. Defendant McCORMICK further stated that he then received a telephone call from Official 1, who asked defendant McCORMICK whether he wanted the funds by cash or check. Defendant McCORMICK said that he
instructed Official 1 that he wanted the money transferred into his account.
Mess of pottage indeed.
A note of desperation in the UK
The UK is warning parents that if their kids are roaming the streets after they get thrown out of school, the parents will be fined £1,000:
The penalties - which come into force for the first time this week - are part of a new crackdown on soaring truancy rates and bad behaviour.
Parents of pupils suspended from school will also be hauled before headteachers for a “reintegration interview” before their child is allowed back into the classroom.
And here’s an understatement:
“Good discipline and strong leadership are vital for driving up standards in our schools,” he said. “But schools can only do so much in isolation. Parents have to be responsible for instilling right and wrong too.
It takes a village? It takes a family.
The NEA and Hugo Chavez have what in common?
Answer: Both will use any means necessary to manipulate the ignorant & weak-minded and thereby secure their hegemony against those who would like freedom to choose.
The Utah voucher battle is heating up and the NEA is poised to send $3 Million to that tiny state to defeat at the ballot box a carefully-crafted voucher program that offers vouchers the poorest residents.
The law is constructed to save the state money and free up desperately needed classroom space in this state with a top-heavy children-to-tax base ratio. That the teacher’s unions vehemently oppose it is a tribute to how desperately they want to maintain their stranglehold on public education.
There are very few things in politics that literally make me want to vomit. This is one of them. Make a donation to the good guys here.
Now for the disbarment of the prosecuter
Just kidding. Kind of.
The boys in Oregon are off the hook on criminal charges, but it’s a “civil compromise,” with fines ($1,000, or $250 to each girl). But it’s a huge relief considering the precipice on which the state was perched.
During the brief hearing, the two boys faced the girls and apologized. “I never intended to hurt you in any way,” Mashburn said. Cornelison told the girls: “I hope we can still be friends.”
The News-Register newspaper of McMinnville reported that a “civil compromise” reached by prosecutors and the defense called for both boys to apologize, to pay each of the four girls $250 and to complete a “boundaries education” program.
7th & 8th grades are generally characterized by lousy behavior. I doubt it’s gotten better since I was there. Let’s just say it was memorable, not entirely amusing, and way more salacious than necessary.
There ought to be some other way to contain these confused hormonal basket cases. Were these boys were singled out unfairly, or were they the more egregious offenders? If the former, the “boundaries education” should be aimed at their entire school. Either way, there ought to be boundaries, but this is a question of social control and guidance, not criminal law.
The prosecutor in this case should be pilloried. But we’ll take what we can get here.
I like this. Really.
Bill and Melinda Gates have a grand idea. I hope they are throwing enough money at it, and I hope others pick it up. They are funding relocation for Iraqi scholars to institutions of higher learning in safer settings.
Officers at the fund, which has helped scholars from Iran to Zimbabwe, began to focus on Iraq after violence – such as a bombing outside a Baghdad university this year that killed 70 people – caused the number of applications from there to soar.
Requests for help from Iraqi academics jumped to as many as 40 a week after averaging three or four a month before autumn 2006. So far, the fund has helped 17 Iraqi scholars find work in other countries.
Iraq is “the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks to science and learning”, said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.
This has the double advantage of saving the individuals from violence, but also of helping to plants seeds that, now or later, might help bring about a renewed Iraqi society. One key characteristic of extreme Islam is hostility to learning and the scientific method. Protecting the seedlings of this in Iraq is an important element of what is much more than a war of bombs. It is also a war of culture.
At least they can talk about it
Interesting piece in the NY Times today signaling India’s growing confidence in its democratic maturity. Its new high school politics textbooks are taking controversial debates into the classroom.
“Basically political science taught you everything except politics; it was considered too risky,” Mr. Yadav said. “I thought my task is to get students to think critically, to begin to question everything, to develop a healthy respect for democracy, not by worshiping it but looking at it squarely.”
Then the reporter engages in a bit of fanciful comparative politics:
In contemporary India, revising school curriculums [sic] is a political ritual in which ideologies of left and right compete. The closest analogy may be the debate over creationism in American education. Governments of the day, whether left or right, have sought to change them to suit their beliefs.
Such debates do not occur over American textbooks because the educational establishment is a subsidiary of the American Left. Creationism is an isolated case, doomed to fail and never wholly supported on the Right. In the pervasive rhythm of social issues, the Leftward tilt is indisputable, and U.S. conservatives have so little traction they don’t even mount a challenge.
Not a very thin veil
Creepier and creepier. Literally, as in Sharia creep, as Michelle Malkin puts it. New York City schools are poised to begin an Arabic public school.
The big argument in favor of American public schools has always been that they are the heating element of the melting pot. NYC, of all places, is now poised to fund an exercise that not only maintains separation, but actually helps to create and advance it:
Not only did the school fail to fill all 60 seats, but it hasn’t attracted a diverse student body, DOE numbers show. Some 75 percent of students identified themselves as “black,” according to the department. It declined to provide an exact figure, citing privacy laws.
And this:
The DOE denied her request to serve “halal” meals sanctioned by Islamic law in the school’s cafeteria. It said the school would be treated like any other public school. Students wanting the meals permissible under Islamic law can bring them from home, Meyer said.
It’s perverse. It’s backward. It’s Sharia.
Essential French culture in eight hours
Guaranteed or your money back.
The French are trying to transmit culture through eight hour seminars for immigrants. Foreigners seeking long term visas have to attend a cultural version of traffic school and sit around for a whole day kibitzing with the instructor. It’s like herding goats.
And, of course, the instructor, an affable Frenchman in his 30s. On the eight-hour agenda, he announced, were lessons in essential French history, laws, values and political institutions, as well as a presentation on the European Union. It was a daunting agenda, the more so considering the instructor’s tireless efforts to repeat everything in English.
“What are some of France’s overseas territories?” he asked hopefully, nodding toward a pull-down map of the world.
“Belgium!” someone called out. Giggles lightened the mood.
Culture doesn’t form this way, but the French missed the memo. Culture is imbibed in the home and schools and on the streets. The first hurdle is to have children. The second is to have streets and schools where large numbers of the children from the parent culture mingle with limited numbers of diverse immigrants. [Top heavy ratios of homogeneous immigrants will lead to cultural enclaves, not to diffusing and blending.]
This isn’t rocket science, but it requires some basic ingredients. Start with children.
