Boston Public Schools graduation rates drop

They are obsessed with overcoming the gap between black and white educational achievement.  But nobody knows how to do that.  So they keep trying their old failed recipe:  Getting blacks enrolled in white schools, which just makes it harder for the black kids.  They see whites achieving what they cannot. And the whites have to take a back seat while teachers work on the blacks.  The end result is that the education of both racial groups is damaged.

Conservatives could have told them that but now their results have told him that. Not only has the gap worsened but EVERYBODY has done less well


The gap between the percentage of Black and white students graduating high school in Boston widened dramatically last year, as the city’s overall graduation rate declined for the first time in more than a decade, according to newly released state data.

Of the 4,347 students in the Class of 2019, 73.2 percent earned a diploma within four years of starting ninth grade. That rate was notably lower than for the Class of 2018, which saw 75.1 percent of students earn diplomas within four years.

The decline comes as Massachusetts officials conduct their first comprehensive review of the Boston system in a decade, with members of the state education board urging Commissioner Jeffrey Riley to take aggressive steps to address low performance in the state’s largest school system. The drop in graduation rates will probably add more urgency to those calls.

“I wish the news today was better, but I’m a firm believer that we can’t make progress if we don’t fully face the facts,” said Boston Superintendent Brenda Cassellius in a statement. “The fact is, we have more work to do to help more students earn their diplomas.”

Cassellius, who took over as superintendent one month after the Class of 2019 graduated, said overhauling high schools is a top priority. In the coming months, for instance, she intends to present the Boston School Committee with a proposal to have high schools adopt MassCore, a state-recommended set of courses that align with admission requirements to state universities and include such measures as four years of math and a minimum of five electives — an area where many Boston high schools fall short.

BPS officials have repeatedly stressed they are working to reduce achievement gaps among students of different backgrounds, but the new graduation rate data reveal that the racial disparity in high school graduates widened notably.

Specifically, the four-year high school graduation rates for Black students dropped from 76.4 percent in 2018 to 71.9 percent last year. By contrast, the four-year graduation rate for white students increased from 80.6 percent in 2018 to 81.9 in 2019.

Consequently, the gulf in graduation rates between Black and white students has more than doubled, resulting in a 10-percentage-point divide.

“I’m disheartened to hear these numbers,” said the Rev. Willie Bodrick II of the Boston Network of Black Student Achievement, who also serves on a School Committee task force on opportunity and achievement gaps. “This is not acceptable and needs to change. … Why does there continue to be an exacerbation of the gaps?”

Latino students continued to record the lowest graduation rates among the system’s racial groups. The portion of Latinos earning diplomas dropped more than a half percentage point in 2019, to 67 percent. Their rate lags white students by 15 percentage points and Asian students by nearly 25 percentage points.

Moreover, graduation rates for Black and Latino students in Boston significantly trailed statewide averages for the demographic groups. Statewide, 79.9 percent of Black students earned a diploma within four years, while 74.4 percent of Latino students did.

Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the declining rates and the widening gulfs among racial groups is alarming.

“The numbers speak for themselves: BPS is not meaningfully supporting students of color so they can graduate from high school, let alone college,” he said. “BPS must dedicate more resources to close achievement and graduation gaps across diverse student populations. The failure to do so traps students of color in a cycle of poverty and hardship.”

City Councilor Michelle Wu said the school system has reached “a breaking point for acknowledging how systemic the issues are and how urgently they need to be fixed.”

“The time for little patches here and there or experimenting with a new program at a small set of schools… has long passed,” she said in an interview. “We need to accept the reality that the system itself so deeply needs equity and reform across the board. We need to have the will to make changes for all our high school students, not just for some of them.”

In visiting high schools across the city last year, Wu said she was struck by the glaring disparities, from the physical condition of the buildings, to the level of resources the schools had, to the opportunities students were given.

City Councilor Andrea Campbell, who released a plan last year calling for overhauling the city’s high schools, called the growing disparity in graduation rates disturbing.

“Our BPS students deserve better and we need a real plan to fix this,” she said in an e-mail.

Riley, the state education commissioner, declined to comment.

The last time Boston experienced a decline in its high school graduation rate was in 2007, when the rate dropped more than 1 percentage point from the previous year to 57.9 percent, according to state data. Since then the portion of high school students earning diplomas climbed steadily, except for 2013 when the district recorded the same rate as the previous year.

Boston School Committee Chairman Michael Loconto said the system has already begun to take steps to overhaul high schools,stressing high school reform is a top priority. “I am confident that the release of this data will only strengthen the district’s resolve to increase rigor across our schools, support additional improvements in our dropout rate, and improve educational outcomes for all of our students,” Loconto said in a statement.

Across the state, 88 percent of the 75,000 students who should have graduated last spring earned diplomas, nearly identical to the rate in 2018 of 87.9 percent. Results were more mixed among the state’s smaller cities.

Brockton, Lowell, and Springfield, for instance, declined overall; Worcester was relatively stagnant; and New Bedford climbed dramatically from 58.6 percent in 2018 to 71.9 percent last year.

Springfield officials focused on the positives in announcing their results Friday. In a press release, they noted that their high school drop-out rate hit an all-time low at 4.4 percent, representing a more than 50 percent reduction over seven years. Officials also singled out individual high schools for praise in raising graduation rates over that seven-year period.

“We want every single student to stay in school so we will keep working hard towards that goal,” said Springfield Superintendent Daniel Warwick in a statement.

Cassellius also highlighted bright spots in the data for Boston, noting the school system’s five-year graduation rate continued to climb, an encouraging indication that students are not giving up on a diploma even after their classmates have graduated and moved onto college. For the Class of 2018, that means 80 percent of students who started high school in fall 2014 earned a diploma within five years, five percentage points higher than the four-year rate.

“We’re becoming more effective at helping students who need a little more time and support to cross the finish line,” Cassellius said.

SOURCE 







UK: Selina Todd and the rise of academic mobs. Academia used to be about open debate. No longer

A female professor is invited to a university to speak about social class. This is bound to go down well with left-leaning academics who measure gender equality down to the nearest penny, right? Apparently not. Next month, Selina Todd is due to speak at the University of Kent as part of a series of public lectures organised by the School of English. In response, an open letter is now circulating, signed by academics and students from Kent and around the world, demanding Todd’s invitation be withdrawn.

Todd is a historian who specialises in the lives of women and the working class. She has dared to suggest that ‘women who posed as men in the past were often lesbians seeking to protect themselves, or because they wanted to do jobs that were only available to men’. Unless we are to assume that every woman who donned a pair of trousers back in the Victorian era was actually a transgender man, over a century before the notion of being transgender had even been invented, this is hardly a controversial view.

Todd’s crime is aligning with gender-critical feminists who believe that a person with a penis is a man and that, while all people should be treated with respect, a man can call himself a transgender woman all he likes, but can never become an actual, biological female just by saying so. Gender-critical feminists are particularly concerned that self-identification might mean an end to female-only spaces or undermine women’s rights. For simply wanting to discuss this, they are labelled transphobes. Todd, having received death threats, now has bodyguards accompany her to lectures.

The open letter to Kent’s School of English is a word-soup of woke cliches, pomposity and tortured academese. It kicks off by stating:

‘We believe that the message that our hosting of Selina Todd sends to trans and non-binary students and staff in the university, our students who are trans and non-binary allies, and our trans and non-binary future applicants is that the school, and more broadly the university, believes that trans identity is “up for discussion”.’

Note the sneering quote marks: how outrageous that anything could be ‘up for discussion’ in a university of all places! But Todd was not even invited to speak about transgender people; the signatories just don’t want her appearing on campus at all. Her very presence is a heresy to the orthodoxy promoted by the transgender movement. Rather than discussing or questioning their ideas we are simply to get in line and repeat their every edict. Black is white. Two plus two equals five. A man who utters the magic words ‘I am a woman’ is a woman.

The letter continues: ‘The English Keynote Lecture series is designed to represent and reflect the attitude, politics and image of the School of English and, by extension, the university.’ But universities, as institutions, are not supposed to have a political position on any issue. Doing so would be antithetical to education; it would suggest that research and teaching must lead to certain pre-determined and incontestable conclusions. It is not the University of Kent, nor the School of English, but the letter-writers themselves who have a closed-minded hostility to difference of opinion.

They go on: ‘The power dynamics of providing a platform to Selina Todd in the name of “academic free speech” means putting trans and non-binary members of our community into the position of having to defend their right to exist.’ This time the scare quotes imply academic freedom is just an excuse for bigotry and suggest that ‘providing a platform’ means far more than simply facilitating a discussion. To substantiate the melodrama of people being forced to defend their existence, they turn to the High Priestess of Academic Wokeness, Sara Ahmed, and her claim that ‘there cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are, in effect or intent, arguing for the elimination of others at the table’. This is truly bonkers. Do the signatories really think that Todd is arguing for the ‘elimination’ of people who describe themselves as transgender? Do they assume that those listening to a lecture on social class will rise up, grab pitchforks and go on a violent rampage against transgender people?

But they continue: ‘The idea that trans people are a threat to women… is a false and harmful narrative.’ All false and harmful? What about Karen White, the male rapist who identified as a woman and sexually assaulted women in prison? What about the male-bodied transgender women who have physically attacked women trying to discuss the Gender Recognition Act? Or women who spend years training to compete in elite sporting contests only to be pushed into second place by men who identify as women? Or the 13-year-old girl currently seeking a judicial review against Oxfordshire County Council because she has to share school toilets and changing rooms with members of the opposite sex. Seriously? The harms inflicted upon these women count for nothing?

The letter-writers soon get to the crux of their problem with Todd: ‘Her views refuse to acknowledge that trans women ARE women, that trans women’s rights ARE women’s rights.’ Todd’s crime is a thoughtcrime. She refuses to chant along with the new orthodoxy spelt out in capital letters for those of us too stupid to read lower case. Perhaps the signatories to the open letter would like to make a bonfire out of biology textbooks. And then perhaps they can burn the witch, too. Because that’s what this open letter really is: a demand for people to pile on and cancel the latest heretic found on campus.

Things could be worse. Given the apparent global reach of the letter, it hasn’t yet garnered thousands of signatures. Many of those who have signed are not academics. Some are students tragically learning censorship at the feet of their professors. Some are professionals employed in quasi-academic roles, paid to manage diversity. The job titles of others (reader in law and social justice; co-director of the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice; lecturer in feminist philosophy) reveal the extent to which the boundary between scholarship and political advocacy has been eroded.

It is tempting to call on government ministers to intervene and enforce academic freedom. But with some lecturers intent on deriding free speech in order to enforce political orthodoxies, this would be a futile gesture. Worse, it would further erode academic freedom as decisions about who gets to speak on campus are taken out of the hands of professors and students. What’s really needed is for academics to stand up for free speech – and to understand that this means allowing a platform for speakers they might vehemently disagree with. So good on the University of Kent for standing firm and keeping Selina Todd’s invitation open. Let’s hope they don’t buckle under the weight of a few signatures.

SOURCE 







Australia: 'What a pathetic joke... absolutely disgusting': Parents' fury as a Perth school bans CUPCAKES at birthday celebrations for 'cultural reasons'

Parents have lashed out at a primary school after its principal said students weren't able to bring cupcakes and lolly bags to class to celebrate their birthday. 

Arbor Grove Primary School in Ellenbrook, Perth issued a letter to parents saying the food would no longer be allowed due to health and cultural reasons.

Principal Glen Purdy said students who brought in unhealthy food items would have their stash confiscated by their teacher and returned at the end of the day.

In the lengthy letter warning parents of the new rule, Mr Purdy said the ban was due to an increasing amount of students with allergies as well as the 'cultural diversity' of its students.

'Whilst teachers at Arbor Grove are happy to celebrate the birthdays of students in the classroom, we must do so in the most inclusive, practical and appropriate way,' he said.

'During our deliberations we have been mindful of the increasing number of students with food allergies and intolerances, the cultural diversity of the school and the beliefs and traditions of these cultures.

'As of Monday 17 February we would ask that parents no longer send students with cupcakes, lolly bags or other unhealthy options for students to share with their classmates for their birthdays.'

The principal said that while it wasn't a 'universally popular decision' it would help avoid the risk of a child suffering a 'life threatening health issue' if they had any allergies.

Mr Purdy also said the rules were 'respectful to the cultural diversity within the school', which has students from 14 different nationalities.

The letter was flooded with criticism from parents, with some saying they should have been able to vote before the ban was put in place.

'Why didn’t they ask the parents to vote? Out of a school over 500 students, let’s say 125 are of cultural difference. What ever happened to majority rules. Man I’m p****d,' one mother said in a parents Facebook page for the school.

'Absolutely disgusting. There are a lot more important issues this school should be concerned about & trying to fix NOT STOPPING OUR KIDS FROM BEING KIDS,' another parent wrote.

'What a pathetic joke of a school. Bowing to the minorities once again!!! This school should be ashamed of itself!' someone commented.

Many were outraged that they had to change Australian traditions to meet those of other cultures.

'So we can send the kids to school with healthy/toy loot bags and that would still be deemed as breaching cultural diversities? I’m calling racism and unfairness on our Aussie traditions here and I am extremely offended by this action,' a father said.

'I don’t put my children through our Australian school to be told that we have to abide by other beliefs, traditions and cultures against and over our very own. It is bloody Australia and we have traditions of our own.'

'Don’t even get me started... so it’s okay to sell soft drinks at a school disco for fundraising but not ok to bring a cupcake to school for a birthday,' a mother wrote.

One parent suggested children be allowed to bring in non-food items like balls or coloured pencils. 'It would be a very sad day when a child is not allowed to celebrate their birthday at school,' they said.

SOURCE