Monday, December 02, 2019



Pete Buttigieg's Big Mistake: Telling the Truth about black education
  
This week, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has risen to the top of the heap in early Democratic presidential primary polling in Iowa and New Hampshire, came under serious sustained attack for the first time in his candidacy. Buttigieg’s early candidacy gained credibility thanks to the moderation he displayed compared with other Democrats. He quickly lost steam when he tacked to the left. Now Buttigieg has swiveled back toward the center, launching a series of assaults on the radical plans of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and stealing her momentum in the largely white early primary states.

Normally, such political rises are attended by a spate of negative reactionary coverage, and Buttigieg’s story is no different. The most effective attack on Buttigieg has centered around his complete lack of black support — a crucial problem for a candidate whose party sees black voters as a near supermajority of primary voters in states like South Carolina. Some of those attacks have focused on Buttigieg’s less-than-stellar governance in South Bend, where crime rates have remained critically high and relations between the local population and police have been strained throughout his tenure.

But the latest attack is on Buttigieg’s entire political mentality. This week, an article from Michael Harriot at The Root, titled “Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF,” trended on Twitter. What, exactly, was Buttigieg’s lie? He suggested back in 2011 that not all educational outcome disparities between blacks and whites are attributable to systemic racism. “The kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg stated (“whitely,” in Harriot’s adjective). “(Y)ou’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your educational process, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids, especially the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t somebody they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

According to Harriot, this statement makes Buttigieg a “lying motherf—.” Why? Because majority-minority schools are underfunded compared with majority-white schools; because black students are “disciplined more harshly than white students,” as Harriot says; because black college graduates don’t have as successful an employment record as white college graduates. “Get-along moderates would rather make s— up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality,” Harriot wrote. “Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.”

But none of these three factors should explain the bulk of racial educational disparities. The black dropout rate from high school is far higher than that of white students, which has nothing to do with underfunded schools. Black students, by best available data, misbehave in school more often than white students. Black students drop out of college far more often than white students, which has nothing to do with institutional discrimination. Adjusting for household income, black women actually overperform white women in terms of college attendance and income. Something else is going on.

What is going on? According to a 2018 study from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, young black men do best in areas with high levels of fatherhood. Lack of school mobility, largely due to entrenched interests preventing such mobility, doesn’t help either. Harvard’s Roland Fryer formalized “a particular peer effect, ‘acting white,’ which potentially contributes to the ongoing puzzle of black underachievement.” Former President Barack Obama similarly suggested an “element of truth” in the accusation that education is undervalued in many black homes, lamenting the attitude “OK, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly?” A study from the Brookings Institution found that black students spend less time on homework than other racial groups — by a long shot.

So, is Buttigieg a “lying motherf—” for pointing out that not all disparities can be attributed to institutional discrimination? Of course not. But in the Democratic Party, such common sense represents political suicide.

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Boy hides microphone in his backpack and goes to school. two teachers are fired the next day

Even if your child is perfectly behaved and healthy, it can still be a struggle to ensure that they know right from wrong and grow up to be successful, confident and mature adults. When the children also have behavioral issues or developmental disabilities, those struggles become that much harder to overcome.

Milissa Davis knows the struggle. Her autistic son Camden struggles with many tasks we take for granted, so as a child she took the extra time to ensure that he was able to succeed.
As he got older, she began to explore schooling options that she felt would give Camden the best chance to succeed later in life. She discovered the Hope Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and was instantly impressed with what they had to offer.

A quick meet and greet later and soon Camden was enrolled in the academy, which primarily serves the disabled community. They primarily work with students that have autism, Asperger’s syndrome, ADHD, learning disabilities, dyslexia, Down Syndrome, and minor learning challenges.

These teachers are hired due to their ability to teach and be responsible for a large number of disabled or struggling students, so Milissa felt that her son would be in good hands there. But soon he started coming home and acting out to his mother in anger. He also began having accidents at bedtime, and both scenarios were very unusual for the typically well-behaved boy.

Milissa had a hunch that something may have happened at school, so she sent him in with a concealed audio recorder in his backpack. What those tapes revealed at the end of the day shocked Milissa to her core.

“I just wanted to cry, scream and do everything I could because it was so bad,” she told WBRZ. “To think that I had sent my son there every day, and what had happened before, that I didn’t know about.”

The recordings included various instances of one particular teacher and assistant mocking the young boy and insulting him openly in class.

“Let’s see what they do with him in f****** public school,” the teacher said on the recording. “He was going to go to Live Oak Middle> He wouldn’t make it for a minute.”

“Camden, why don’t you have anything written down? That’s why you can’t sit with everyone. Tell your momma that,” she said to the 12-year-old.

Linda Stone, principal of Hope Academy released a statement, saying that the “recording contains regretful conversations between these adults.” Stone said that Milissa refused to meet with Hope Academy to discuss the changes they have made to “address the issue,” and goes on to say that both of the teachers involved were let go after an internal investigation.

“We ask that the community not let the actions of two persons reflect on the reputation and the mission of our school – a mission that we have tried so hard to build. We again extend an invitation to meet with the parent involved to discuss this incident further.”

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University of Western Australia partnership with fossil fuel companies

The University of Western Australia is facing criticism over a partnership with fossil fuel companies that promises to help the gas industry expand into remote fields that have so far been too costly to develop.

Western Australian premier Mark McGowan praised the creation of what is known as the Centre for Long Subsea Tiebacks, a partnership between the university and Chevron and Woodside, which are contributing $600,000 a year.

A statement posted on the state government and the university’s websites says the centre will focus on how to improve “tiebacks” – connections between new oil and gas fields and existing production facilities – in hostile deep-sea conditions.

It follows the establishment of other recent university-industry partnerships designed to help the state’s liquified natural gas (LNG) operations, which have grown rapidly over the past five years to be a significant employer and major export industry.

Launching the centre, McGowan said bringing more oil and gas projects online would position the state as a global energy leader. It would also mean more jobs for Western Australians. “That’s my government’s number one priority,” he said.

Alex Gardner, a professor and environmental lawyer at the University of Western Australia, said the centre was just part of what was broad backing from the university sector for the petroleum industry. He said he acknowledged universities and academics should be free to research and teach according to their choices.

But he said there did not seem to be a discussion about how the continuing expansion of the LNG industry fit within Australia’s emissions budget if it was to play its part in meeting the goals set at the UN Paris conference in 2015.

The announcement of the centre comes as Woodside leads plans to develop the long mooted Scarborough and Browse gas projects in northern WA.

Announcing the centre, Dawn Freshwater, the university’s vice-chancellor, said it fulfilled the institution’s aim of serving the community and improving people’s lives. “Not only will it enhance Perth and WA as a centre of offshore engineering excellence, it aligns with [the university’s] plans to expand and strengthen global partnerships,” she said.

Woodside’s chief executive, Peter Coleman, said: “We believe this partnership will play a crucial role in unlocking new gas resources off Western Australia’s north coast in support of our growth activities.”

Chevron’s managing director, Al Williams, said the company was proud to partner with the university on the centre.

In August, Williams announced that a carbon capture and storage project at Chevron’s Gorgon LNG development had begun operating after repeated delays stretching back to 2016. The company has previously estimated between 3.4m and 4m tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 40% of the emissions at Gorgon, could be buried each year.

SOURCE  


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