Why Minority Academic Underachievement Persists

This article does hit on some of the factors

In virtually every U.S. school system, the academic parity between African American students and other students is disturbing.

As decisions are made on the state and local level about how and in what form we will educate the nation’s children, an age-old issue remains: The underlying cause of income inequality and the resulting civil unrest likely has less to do with media-inflamed coverage and much more to do with the problem that apparently no one wants to discuss and that is educational disparity.

The disparity year after year, decade after decade, in math competency, reading proficiency, test scores, honor roll status, and graduation rates, in virtually every U.S. school system, between African American students and other students is disturbing.

No Optimism on the Horizon

Any responsible American would be concerned. Here in the third decade of the third millennium, with a disheartening male African American high school dropout rate across the U.S., can anyone view the situation optimistically?

“It’s remarkable,” noted Eric Hanushek, who is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Following his extensive analysis, he remarked, “I knew that the gap hadn’t been closing too much, but when I actually looked at the data I was myself surprised.”

When strenuous efforts to bridge the gap, in one community after another, do not bear fruit, invariably someone yells “foul,” as if some grand conspiracy is occurring and a magic wand, yet to be waved, could suddenly redress all. And, as if long-term, hard-working, dedicated teachers are not attempting their utmost for each of their students.

An Undesirable Path

Consider the school system in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina. This locale, deemed, “The southern part of heaven,” by writers, is among the most progressive in the United States. The teachers and educators here have a vested interest in demonstrating that their school system, beyond all others, can succeed in the vital area of closing achievement gaps between whites and minorities.

Year in and year out, nevertheless, the gap remains. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education is primed to try anything. Another in an endless line of supposed “fixes” was to eliminate the advanced math classes in the middle schools and to lump all non-pre-algebra students together, with similar plans to eliminate other advanced classes such as in language arts.

One cannot easily erect a sound building on quicksand, and you cannot expect to solve a decades-old problem by starting with a shaky foundation. Taking a lowest common denominator approach to developing school curriculum has never consistently worked, anywhere. It frustrates the students and dramatically increases a teacher’s burden – all such students must then be taught at individual learning speeds. Do you know any superhuman teachers? If so, could you afford them?

The Real Issues are Masked

Truly closing the academic gap between underachieving students and the rest of the student population requires addressing reality – airing the truth about the disparity – not resorting to politically “correct” psychobabble and curricula finagling for another ten years, and then another ten, and then another.

This disparity encompasses such issues as the number of hours the television is on in given households, family or parental encouragement for completing homework assignments, a regular workspace, and established hours for studying in a quiet environment, among other factors. Meanwhile Nigerians, Ghanians, Haitians, and other groups get into high seemingly right off the boat, and within one generation or less become a part of the U.S. economic mainstream.

Until solid analysis, exploration, and programs that address these issues are undertaken, no amount of wrangling with classes will prove to be the “winning formula.” School boards, moreover, will have zero chance of effectively addressing the continuing problem of poor academic performance among student groups.

Detective Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Sign of Four, says, “… When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The schools in U.S. communities routinely exhaust talented teachers with a task that cannot be solved by them, nor is it theirs to solve.

Committed Students, Ready to Learn

Satisfactory academic achievement, however improbable to those who wish to pretend otherwise, occurs through individual effort: one boy and one girl after another rising above and cracking the books, then coming to class as a serious student, eager to learn, and primed to excel.

Such achievement is never likely to occur any other way. Otherwise, expect that income inequality and civil unrest will continue for decades into the 21st century.

https://flagandcross.com/why-minority-academic-underachievement-persists/

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Attorney General Garland Abuses Power He Doesn’t Have to Threaten Parents

Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo on Monday directing the Department of Justice and the FBI to “launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”

The Garland memo looks like an effort to use the FBI to threaten and silence parents who are outspoken opponents of critical race theory in schools. That alone would be a stunning partisan abuse of power. What Garland has done, however, is even more disgraceful.

Maybe Garland doesn’t actually intend to use the FBI to go after parents—maybe he knows that he doesn’t have that power. In that case, he’s trying to trick parents into thinking that he does. This tactic, he hopes, will suppress parents’ free speech, and throw a bone to a powerful ally of his political party.

Even a few FBI agents questioning parents may be enough to convince others that standing up for their values is not worth the risk.

To understand what Garland is doing with this memo, you’ll need a short primer on the background facts and government legalese.

Starting with the facts: What is this “rise in criminal conduct” against school officials? You won’t find any evidence cited in Garland’s memo. You won’t find any evidence in the FBI’s crime data either.

This claim is parroted from a letter sent to President Joe Biden by the National School Boards Association—a powerful leftist group representing many of the school boards around the country pushing critical race theory curricula. That letter made vague claims about “threats and acts of violence” against school board members from parents who oppose critical race theory.

The letter complained about “disruptions” by angry parents but managed to find only one example of violence against a school official (likely a security guard), which was handled by local law enforcement.

Most of the letter is the National School Boards Association clutching its pearls, aghast that justifiably angry parents are zealously advocating for their children’s interest. The tactics thus far employed certainly are nothing compared to the riots of the summer of 2020 that destroyed over a billion dollars in property and resulted in multiple deaths.

Those tactics were not decried by the National School Boards Association and its liberal friends. In fact, the current vice president organized financial support to the criminals engaged.

The National School Boards Association is not really concerned about an isolated instance of violence adequately handled by local law enforcement. It is much more upset that it is powerless to stop parents from exercising their First Amendment rights to push back against critical race theory in the classroom.

And so, in a move that is nearly a reflex among many leftist organizations, it asked the government to lend it some of its law enforcement power to shut up its meddling critics. Garland was only too happy to oblige. In doing so, he has made a hypocrite out of himself and Biden.

When Biden announced Garland’s nomination, he promised to uphold the independence of the DOJ from the political influence of the White House. Garland promised the same, saying:

I have spent my whole professional life looking up to Ed Levi and the other post-Watergate Attorneys General who stood up on behalf of the Department against impermissible pressure and influence. If I am confirmed as Attorney General, I intend to do the same.

There is no clearer example of political influence seeping into the DOJ than a demand letter to the president from a leftist advocacy group turning into a DOJ memorandum in less than a week.

But Garland’s weaponization of the DOJ has a problem: There is no conceivable basis for federal law enforcement action against these parents.

Unlike Attorney General Eric Holder, who twisted and abused the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to silence pro-life advocates, Garland can’t find any law that he can similarly mangle to silence parents. If he could, he would have put it in the memo.

But the parents don’t know that.

And here enters the government legalese. Garland’s memo fails to cite any basis for law enforcement action by the DOJ or the FBI, but it hides that with a morass of official language that says nothing more than that federal law enforcement will provide some advice to local school boards.

FBI agents and federal prosecutors (who have nothing better to do, apparently) will travel the country giving school boards the phone number of their local police and the web address of the FBI’s internet tip line.

After the sound and fury calms, nothing beside remains.

What do we make of all this?

First, there is no reason to bring federal law enforcement into this; local authorities have this under control.

Second, Garland has demonstrated, disappointingly, that he is beholden to powerful leftist political groups and perfectly happy to let them use the threat of federal government’s law enforcement power to suppress their critics’ right to free speech. The promised impendence of the DOJ is a farce.

Third, it is more important to Garland to spend scarce law enforcement resources appeasing liberal interest groups than on more pressing national concerns.

Fourth, some good news, parents need not be afraid. It is their constitutional right to push back in legal ways against schools teaching children critical race theory.

Go forth to the school boards and make your voices heard.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/10/05/attorney-general-garland-abuses-power-he-doesnt-have-to-threaten-parents/

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Rainbow Mafia Objects to School ‘Pride Flag’ Ban

Bullies will scream about being the “victims” as soon as those they have been bulling finally stand up and push back. Such is the case in several school districts across the country, where school officials have recently enacted policies that bar educators from displaying overt political messaging — specifically including the controversial homosexuality-promoting rainbow “pride flag.” As Newberg, Oregon, school board member Brian Shannon explained, “We don’t pay our teachers to push their political views on our students.” The nerve.

One of the biggest lies perpetuated in our nation is that the mainstream media doesn’t suffer from a leftist political bent. Exhibit umpteen million to the contrary is an NBC News story from its “Out News” division about how pride flags are a new “target” in the education culture war. The article’s first sentence makes a preposterous claim: “Pride flags, which were created to promote unity, are being called political and divisive in some schools across the country.” The truth, of course, is that the rainbow flag always has represented a politically divisive agenda that remains highly offensive to many Americans. Leftists nearly always have been the aggressors in the culture wars, yet here they are claiming victim status.

It’s both hypocritical and ironic that leftists seemingly see no problem with their overtly offensive and political displays, while at the same time they scream about the mere existence of historically accepted social and cultural symbols that they decry as evil. And often these leftist social agitators have to rewrite history in order to make their victimology narrative stick.

One of the biggest examples of this devious tactic was the false narrative surrounding the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. The Rainbow Mafia seeded total falsehoods and then used them to great effect to contend that homosexuals were suffering from “hate crimes.” The truth is Shepard was a homosexual involved in drugs, and he was killed by two homosexuals involved in drugs.

Back to today’s schools, the notion that banning the display of the “pride flag” in American classrooms is tantamount to “oppressing” those who have embraced a homosexual identity is as phony as a $3 bill. Furthermore, it’s not that students themselves aren’t allowed to display “pride” paraphernalia on their own person or property. Rather, it’s that the schools and their employees cannot explicitly promote such messaging.

This reality long has been the case for religiously committed individuals. A public school teacher would not be free to hang a Christian flag in his classroom as he would be sending a religious or specific political message. Is the forbidding of overtly religious displays doing “violence” to religiously committed or identifying students? By no means.

Of course, in an attempt to back up the ridiculous claim that not allowing teachers to display the controversial “pride flag” will hurt students, NBC’s journalist hack points to the high attempted suicide rate among homosexual-identifying youths. Maybe that suicide rate should cause more of an introspection and examination of homosexual identity in the first place, not simply a louder and unquestioning embrace and celebration of a deviant lifestyle.

But that is exactly the issue — to allow people the freedom to object to and question the “goodness” of homosexuality is to violate the Left’s dogmatic agenda. That’s why the whole issue is political, and it’s why schools are right to ban it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/83192-rainbow-mafia-objects-to-school-pride-flag-ban-2021-10-05

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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