Thursday, May 09, 2019






Boston's Metco program will now bus random minority students into suburban schools

In the Metco program, Boston students are bussed to suburban schools. A limit of 100 students per school is observed so that the bussed students do not wreck the suburban schools.  So the number of minorities wanting to get their children on the program greatly exceeds its limits. Those who apply soonest are the ones who make the grade. 

This means that parents who are organized and think ahead get the available slots.  And that of course selects for brighter parents, who tend to have brighter and more organized children.  So such students cause minimal disruption to their host schools

And we can't have that!  The Leftist fixation on destroying anything they can has now invaded this program too.  Students will now be chosen randomly for the program, thus injecting a big dose of ghetto into otherwise orderly schools.  The talk is of fairness.  The glee is over how disruptive the new arrangements will be.  The old compulsory bussing program got knocked out by white flight so this revives at least a part of it



The days of Boston families signing up their children for the Metco program as soon as they are born are now history.

Massachusetts education officials have given the voluntary school integration program permission to choose students through a lottery instead of on a first-come first-serve basis, in an effort to bring more fairness to those who get in. Under the changes, announced Monday, parents will be able to submit applications only in the fall for the following school year.

“This is a very historic moment for Metco,” said Milly Arbaje-Thomas, chief executive of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, which runs the program. “We now will be able to meet all constituencies in all neighborhoods, whether they are long-term residents or newcomers. We want a student population that is more reflective of Boston’s demographics.”

The new system, which was originally proposed earlier this year, will be phased in over the next two admission cycles, starting with students seeking slots for the 2020-21 school year. Applications will also shift from paper to an online portal. Families, however, will still be able to apply in person at the program’s Roxbury office.

Metco, which enrolls 3,300 Boston students in 33 suburban districts annually, has often been held up by researchers and policy makers as a successful way to voluntarily integrate public schools. A Harvard University researcher this winter found that Metco students had higher high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates than their peers in traditional Boston Public Schools and charter schools.

The children are bused from Boston to the schools in the suburbs. The state spends about $20 million annually to fund Metco in Boston and another program in Springfield, although suburban districts spend their own money on the program, too.

The program’s success has fueled a fever-pitched frenzy to get in, resulting in a waiting list of 15,000 students, about half of whom were infants or toddlers. Program staff filed away paper applications in the order they were received and for the specified school year.

But the program also has been plagued with questions over the fairness of its application process and whether it is truly serving students with no other options. That’s because the program tends to enroll a student population that is more affluent than the one in the Boston Public Schools.

The program also has failed to keep pace with the changing diversity of Boston, enrolling mostly black students at a time when the city has seen a big infusion of Latinos and other ethnic and racial groups.

The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education formally approved the new application process on April 30. The program has largely purged its waiting list.

“We appreciate the thoughtful approach that Metco Inc. has taken, and we believe these changes will help bring clarity to the Metco enrollment process in Boston,” said Jacqueline Reis, a state education spokeswoman.

Families hoping to secure seats for their children for fall 2020 can apply between Oct. 2 and Dec. 31. The lottery will take place in January. Children who don’t win a seat will need to reapply for a subsequent school year.

More changes could be on the way. Arbaje-Thomas said the program will be drafting specific admission criteria. Currently, the program refers applicants to specific districts, which have some discretion in making admission offers.

“We are trying to keep the program viable and alive for another 50 years,” she said. “In order to do that you have to modernize.”

SOURCE 







UK: Cambridge Capitulates to the Mob and Fires a Young Scholar

The vicious Left again

We live at a time where academic freedom is under threat from ideologues and activists of all persuasions. The latest threat comes from St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where administrators appear to have capitulated to a mob of activists (students and academics) who mounted a campaign to have a young scholar fired for “problematic” research. The back-story was covered by Quillette last December.

The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of...

The norms of academia—which have been built up and preserved by institutions such as Cambridge for centuries—demand that academics engage with each other in a scholarly manner. That is, if one academic has a problem with the methods or conclusions of another’s research, he or she should address those concerns within journals, according to established procedures, which other scholars can then read and respond to, including the academic whose research is being challenged.

Today, due to the hyper-specialisation of academic fields, most academics will not be able to judge the quality of scholarship that is published in journals outside their field. That’s why when research is peer-reviewed it is done by experts in the specific field in which the research was carried out, not by a random selection of university professors. Just as a professor of English will not be able to judge a study conducted within chemical engineering, a chemical engineer will not be able to assess a scholarly essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets.

To judge the quality of Dr Noah Carl’s work authoritatively, one would have to be an expert in at least one of the following fields: psychology, intelligence research (a sub-field of psychology), and/or economics. The campaign against him began with an ‘open letter’ that was signed by hundreds of academics, but they did not have expertise in these areas. (For the most part, they had qualifications in fields like anthropology, gender studies and critical race studies). This is a clear departure from the established norms that, until recently, were adhered to in academic debates, a point made in an editorial about this affair by the executive team at the Heterodox Academy:

Communal inquiry and debate are at the heart of the academy. As researchers, we put our ideas into the crucible of open inquiry and rely on debate and discussion to refine understanding and advance solutions to complex problems. The practice of issuing open letters attacking scholars for their contributions undermines this important goal by evicting academics and their ideas from the arena—often on flimsy evidentiary grounds. More constructive responses can and should be employed.

The administrators at St Edmund’s College who determined that Dr Noah Carl should be fired did not have qualifications in these areas, either. The Master of St. Edmunds is a former banker, and the administrator who led the investigation that decided Dr Carl is guilty of “poor scholarship” is a veterinary scientist.

Admittedly, one does not have to be an expert in a specific field to adjudicate on matters of academic misconduct such as fraud or data fabrication—and Dr Carl has been accused of “ethical breaches”. But the statement by the Master on the college website justifying Dr Carl’s dismissal stops short of alleging anything close to academic fraud. The sin he’s been found guilty of—his “ethical breach”—is carrying out “problematic” research, such as producing a paper on the accuracy of consensual stereotypes about the characteristics of different groups (e.g. sexes, races, nationalities). Here is the key passage in the Master’s statement:

There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.

So Dr Carl has been dismissed not because his research is fraudulent or inaccurate, but because there’s a risk it could lead indirectly to bad actors promoting views that could incite racial or religious hatred. It matters not whether the scholarship is true; the critical thing is whether it upsets people.

Universities like Cambridge proudly resisted these assaults on intellectual freedom in the past—it was the home of such free thinkers as Erasmus, Charles Darwin and John Maynard Keynes. Indeed, protecting scholars from persecution by political and religious pressure became one of the defining purposes of the world’s great universities.

Imagine what would happen if the behaviour of St Edmund’s College become a new norm. Should philosophers who debate issues of euthanasia and abortion be fired because some Christian students might find their work offensive? Should novelists like Salman Rushdie be refused a platform because their work could incite religious hatred? Should geneticists who discover differences in populations emerging from genetic ancestry be fired because some students might be offended by these findings? Should biologists who operate on the assumption that sex is bimodal be defunded because some trans rights activists might find their work upsetting? The list of scholars who could be fired if the standard that has been applied to Dr Noah Carl is applied universally is endless.

The editors at Quillette steadfastly support the foundational principles of open inquiry and free thought. While we are not academics, we are gravely concerned that an injustice to a young scholar has occurred in this particular instance, and that more broadly, academic freedom is buckling under the political pressure as typified by the original open letter calling for his sacking. If the custodians of Cambridge are unable to protect its distinguished history and foundational principles, it is up to all of us to take a stand in support of them.

SOURCE 






High School Mulls Removing George Washington Murals Because They 'Traumatize' Students

How come that they have just recently started "traumatizing" students?

A high school in Northern California — George Washington High School, to be specific — is mulling over a push to remove two 83-year-old murals from its hallways. Critics advocating for their removal say they are offensive to Native Americans and African-Americans. They say the pair of panels “traumatizes students and community members.”

A San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) working group says the murals should be removed and put in storage to protect the students.

"SFUSD convened a ‘Reflection and Action Working Group’ that was comprised of members of the local Native American community, students, school representatives, district representatives, local artists and historians," Laura Dudnick, spokeswoman for the district, wrote in an email to The College Fix. "At its conclusion the group voted and the majority recommended that the 'Life of Washington' mural be archived and removed because the mural does not represent SFUSD values," the letter continued.

"Two of the thirteen panels in the mural series have come under fire since the 1960’s for their controversial depictions of African-Americans and Native Americans," the Richmond District Blog writes.

In one mural, entitled “Mount Vernon”, George Washington appears to be in conversation with another Caucasian man who gestures towards a seated African-American man holding corn, presumably a slave. In other parts of the mural, African-Americans are engaged in acts of manual labor like hauling large bales of hay and picking cotton in the fields, while Caucasian men are also laboring at other tasks with tools. Washington’s servant, who is pictured holding his horse, is also African-American. The mural is a clear depiction of slavery in the United States, and of George Washington as a slave owner.

The second panel, entitled "Westward Vision," depicts Benjamin Franklin and other founding fathers looking at George Washington as he points off in the distance, while he points with his other hand to a map. On the right side of the mural, as if carrying out Washington’s call for westward expansion, frontiersmen, depicted in greyscale unlike other figures in the mural, stand over the dead body of a Native American man, signifying the genocide of Native American life and culture.

In the bottom right of the “Westward Vision” panel, a frontiersman and Native American chief sit at a campfire smoking a peace pipe. On the ground at the chief’s feet is a tomahawk, symbolizing the disarming of Native tribes. Directly above the Chief’s headdress is a broken tree limb representing broken treaties made by the U.S. government with Native Americans, and broken promises made by settlers.

Here's the irony, though. The murals were painted in 1936 by artist Victor Arnautoff, who was a protégé of Diego Rivera and a communist. "He included those images not to glorify Washington, but rather to provoke a nuanced evaluation of his legacy. The scene with the dead Native American, for instance, calls attention to the price of 'manifest destiny.' Arnautoff’s murals also portray the slaves with humanity and the several live Indians as vigorous and manly," The Wall Street Journal reports.

Historian Fergus M. Bordewich told The Fix that it is "a deeply wrongheaded habit to project today’s norms, values, ideals backwards in time to find our ancestors inevitably falling short."

"It betrays a very troubling intolerance of art and the ambiguity of art and the aspirations of art," he said. "It’s incredibly stupid if we try to erase history. It still happened, and you should argue about its meanings."

SOURCE 




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