This is a good article that exposes some of the downfalls of the Chinese curriculum we are trying to copy here in our own backyard.

GOOD Lite: If China’s Education Policies Create Depressed Students, Why Are We Copying Them? http://goo.gl/mag/ys7hs

So glad to see that not everyone has abandoned this city. There is still hope for these dear kids.

From the site

About Kerbal Space Program

In KSP, you must build a space-worthy craft, capable of flying it’s crew out into space, without killing them.At your disposal is a collection of parts, which must be assembled to create a functional ship. Each part has it’s own function and will affect the way a ship flies (or doesn’t).So strap yourself in, and get ready to try some Rocket Science!

From time to time I come across a resource on the web that I feel serves as an invaluable educational tool for our kids. As a parent myself, I am constantly on the hunt for such tools.

biodigitalhuman.com is a site that teaches visitors about the human body by providing an interactive 3D image. Viewers can view the inner workings of the human body by clicking through the menu. This is simply a great resource.

Will Higher Standards for the Bar Exam Mean Fewer Blacks in the Legal Field?

“The American Bar Association, the accrediting agency for U.S. law schools, is considering a new proposal that will require law school graduates to score higher on the bar examination, which could in turn impact the number of minorities practicing in the field of law, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports.

“Many college deans, especially those at historically Black universities, fear that in order to meet those standards, universities will be less likely to admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds who typically score lower on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT).”

Since when has the below 80 score range been reserved for Blacks (80 is the proposed passing score)?

I’m not going to get into all the possible reasons why Blacks tend to score lower on these tests. But this is another example of how people not only expect Blacks to perform poorly, but fight for us to stay on the handicap ramp.

When rules are changed in sports, it’s interesting that we hear nothing about how Blacks negatively affected by such changes. But here we have some in the halls of academia who are shaking in their boots because they just don’t believe we are capable of pushing harder. Unfortunately, even some Blacks in these halls have low expectations of their own people. Never mind the fact that these same Blacks somehow managed to find a way to bust their butt to get to where they are today. But for some reason, they find it difficult to expect the same effort from their own.

By expecting minimum requirement from our kids, we help continue the many stories where defendants are given shoddy legal representation. So we are left with continued “woe is me” complaints while we continue to hold White legal practitioners to standards of perfection. One legal screw up for them when representing us, and it us the “racist” dog house for them.

Starting with my own kids, I expect them to be amongst the best and the brightest, not the “just making it” and dimmest.

Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis made a commitment to both the city and parents that he would see to it that all who were implicated in the cheating scandal would be fired. But here’s the problem, according to this latest article in the AJC, IT TAKES 4 MONTHS TO FIRE A TEACHER.

Of the 178 teachers and administrators accused of cheating, only 4 of them have heeded Davis’ ultimatum of “quit or get fired”.

“APS, it appears, is on the verge of a long and costly journey to fire nearly 200 employees, as a mass of resignations appeared Tuesday to be a waning prospect.

Sharon Davis-Williams, Michael Pitts, Robin Hall and Tamara Cotman, all area superintendents named in the cheating report, told Channel 2 Action News they did not cheat or condone cheating in the local schools they oversaw. An attorney representing the four said there are no documents proving his clients cheated.

“I am going to fight not just for the job, but I had a reputation and career and a focus on serving children,” said Cotman, who the district reassigned earlier this year for allegedly telling principals during the probe to pen “go to hell” memos to GBI agents.”

The article goes on to mention that the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE) is representing about 24 of the teachers/administrators who were mentioned in the state report. Although PAGE does not claim to be a union, they still collect dues from teachers and provide legal representation when needed.

If 80 of the 178 have confessed to cheating, that means that 80 of them should have handed in their resignations. But again, only 4 have actually resigned. That means that the taxpayers of the city of Atlanta are going to potentially see millions of dollars that would have gone to help these schools diverted to the effort to remove these teachers.

Speaking of money, it was also reported that 4 superintendents will continue to stay on the payroll. Why? Because they renewed their contracts in May.

(I’m sorry, but you can’t tell me they did not know this mess was coming down)

Meanwhile, New Jersey is looking at 34 schools that are involved in a cheating scandal of their own.

This story continues to smolder here in Atlanta. Here is the latest:

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“One teacher told investigators the district was “run like the mob.”

“Everybody was in fear,” another teacher said in the report. “It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared.”

For teachers and their bosses, the stakes were high: Schools that perform poorly and fail to meet certain benchmarks under the federal law can face sharp sanctions. They may be forced to offer extra tutoring, allow parents to transfer children to better schools, or fire teachers and administrators who don’t pass muster.”

[...]

One principal forced a teacher to crawl under a desk during a faculty meeting because her test scores were low. Another principal told teachers that “Walmart is hiring” and “the door swings both ways,” the report said.

Another principal told a teacher on her first day that the school did whatever was necessary to meet testing benchmarks, even if that meant “breaking the rules.” (read more…)

Local business leaders helped cover some of this mess, according to the AJC.

“The city’s chamber of commerce and another business group took control of the district’s investigation last year into irregularities on state-mandated tests. Executives at the Metro Atlanta Chamber set the parameters of the inquiry and largely selected the people who ran it. Later, they suggested ways to “finesse” the findings past the governor.

Business leaders published opinion pieces and letters to the editor defending Hall before cheating inquiries were complete; calls for the superintendent to resign, they said, could undermine the district’s progress. And just as they had lobbied almost a decade earlier to give the superintendent more autonomy from the Board of Education, this year they sought new power for the governor to remove recalcitrant board members.”

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Again, you have to come back to the thousands of kids who have been jacked up because of this over the past 10 years. This feeds into the dropout rates both in high school and in college.

Again, why no word from teacher unions? What is their policy of handling members who were involved in this mess?

I was thinking as I was coming home that any minute someone is going to recast the teachers in the Atlanta Public School cheating scandal as “victims” of NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

Minute is up!

—>”Top-down polices such as the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top have provided an incentive to manipulate test scores, deceptively report graduation rates and falsify actual student performance in our schools.
Noted educator and activist Dr. Pedro Noguera of New York University has said ‘NCLB was adopted into law in 2001. The fact that nearly every major city in the U.S. has dropout rates of 50 percent and higher is the clearest evidence that the policy has failed and a new approach is needed.’” (from Jesse Jackson’s latest CNN article “Flawed policy on testing drives schools to cheat“)<—

I have said many times in the past that while NCLB had good intentions, it was not a long term solution. Tie pay to performance and folks will always find a way to…OUTperform. But this is government we are talking about and quite frankly I think it is best option that can be offered for public schools. G.W. Bush conceived this baby and Edward Kennedy helped push it out.

But back to Jackson’s point, there is no government policy that can drive anyone to do the wrong thing. Especially when it comes to the future of our children. Both the teachers and the administrators involved in this mess cared more about their wallet than the kids. What really gets me is that many of these same teachers will use these kids as human shields anytime there are talks of cutting the school budget. “It’s about the kids!”

This is also about parents who have totally given the role of “parent” to these teachers. If the parents were more involved, much of this would have been avoided.

In the meantime, cheating allegations are starting to come to light in both Philly, DC and Baltimore.

Here’s something else to think about: The NEA (National Education Association) has already endorsed Obama for 2012 but have yet to issue a major comment on these cheating scandals.

So much for the kids.

I read in one article today where someone suggested that only the school administrators should take the fall on this, not the teachers. Sorry, but if it is your job to care for children FIRST and you knowingly put your job security above them, you are greedy. All of these people had a choice to do the right thing and they didn’t. What’s messed up is that it only took them a decade to realize all if this was going on.

I’m talking about the many unfortunate students of the Atlanta Public School System. According to a report just released by the governor’s office, 44 of the 56 schools in the district were involved in systematic cheating. Read the story here.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks…

Add your own commentary.

Watch (If you have not seen it already)

President and CEO of the NAACP, Ben Jealous lists out his reasons for joining a lawsuit against parents who want a charter school in their community. The only problem is that he leaves readers with more questions.

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“First, the city has located charter schools under the same roofs as traditional public schools in a way that is unfair and unjust. Their poor handling has led to many complaints from our members and their neighbors, including:

■ Students in the traditional public school must now eat lunch at 10 a.m. so that charter school students can enjoy lunch at noon.

■ The “regular school’s children” had library access for a little over four hours so that the “new charter school’s kids” could have access for almost seven.

■ “Traditional school students” were moved to a basement, where they were next to the boiler room, to make room for their charter school peers, and teachers of the regular students were forced to teach in the halls due to lack of space.

We are asking that the court require the city to follow state law and handle these shared space situations equitably.

Second, inequitable co-locations exacerbate the problem created by the city’s persistent failure to follow the law and engage parents before making major changes. New York state law requires the city to involve parents before announcing its intention to shut down a school or make way for a charter to share a school’s space.”
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The biggest thing that Jealous misses here is that the reason why charter schools are in this position to share public school building in NYC is the high denial rate of local school boards to approve the construction of new schools.

Second thing his misses is that charter schools are open for ANYBODY to attend. The reason why lotteries are held for charter school programs is because of the limited space they are allotted by school boards in favor of larger underperforming schools.

Speaking of lotteries, Jealous also fails to mention the little fact that while there are waiting lists of kids to get into these charter schools, no such waiting lists exist for these underperforming schools.

Last but not least, Jealous failed to mention or explain the following:

“So why would a rightly proud group like the NAACP side with the teachers union and block the schoolhouse door to minority kids? Try money.
It turns out that the UFT and its statewide counterpart, NYSUT, have “donated” more than $100,000 to the NAACP’s New York State Conference just since 2008. Not many poor black and Hispanic families can likely compete with that kind of payoff.”

I’ll repeat what I said in an earlier post~

“Yet another sad day for the NAACP when it rents out it’s political voice to the highest bidder.”.

Check out the following documentaries.

Jealous, what are you doing to help these parents?

As you know, the Obama’s exercise their free choice to send their kids to the Sidwell Friends School in the Washington area. Nothing wrong with that. But why does his party fight so hard against your choice as parents?

“But with charter schools, some kids will be left behind.”

The kids that will be left behind are the kids whose parents don’t give a rip about their child’s education. So why has this very weak excuse become the main line of offense against alternative schools, I don’t know.

Lawsuit may prevent New Visions charter schools from opening in Marble Hill

Superintendent Sends Letter Opposing Charter Schools

BOE vote opposes charter school applications

I remember when the following story hit the new wires and the very same kneegrows that will “Amen” Obama on every point were quick to send a virtual high-5 to these kids.

Chicago’s Urban Prep Sends All Graduates To College (VIDEO)

Voicing criticism is one thing. Not voting for the same party over and over that unapologetically fights against parents and kids over this issue is real protest. Every thing else is just whining.

Over this weekend, I finally viewed the documentary “The Cartel” and to this day I am still shaking my head over what I both heard and saw. This was a documentary that covered the state of public education in New Jersey (a state that ranks near the top of amount spent per child). While most of movie centered around New Jersey, the issues that were covered can be seen all across the nation.

One of the things I liked about this film was that it included people from both sides of the political spectrum that were all saying the same thing: the public school system is a cartel.

Yes, the public school system does have some great teachers who really do care for their students. But the unions behind these great teachers ultimately care very little about the students. They are nothing more than political machines.

The full movie is on Netflix. In the meantime, here are some clips.

I think that I am going to stay in this vein for a while.

When the NAACP protests AGAINST Black parents, it shows that it is no longer an organization that supports Black interests. The teacher’s unions could not handle this battle alone, so they had to get their black dogs out to do the barking.

Instead of attending county colleges, Ben Jealous (President of NAACP) attended Columbia University, and Roger C. Vann (Chief Operating Officer) attended Brown University. They did not have to go to those schools, but went there because they had the CHOICE to do so. The NAACP want to take that same choice for a better education away from Black parents.

Of course, this attitude is nothing new for the NAACP. I have quoted Manning Johnson many times before on this site. Here is what he had to say about the organization back in the 1950′s.

“The NAACP collects millions of dollars through racial incitement. They go out of their way to create race issues, because the more race issues they create the more they have got an appeal for begging for funds, but what do they do with that money. What do they do with it?

They do not spend one single cent to build any factories, or shops to create jobs or to contribute to the development of free enterprise in this country. They’re not interested in that.

In fact, when they hold a convention they don’t even go near the Negro neighborhoods, when they’re spending their money. In Cleveland recently when they held their convention they collected money from the business people in Cleveland, the colored business people. They went to a white hotel and they ate in white restaurants. They didn’t spend any money in the Negro business places, yet they say that they are for the race. It’s unfortunate that when they were in Washington at this so-called summit conference, they went to the Raleigh hotel, the white hotel on Pennsylvania Ave. They ate in the restaurants there; they didn’t even go near the colored community. They ’re supposed to represent the colored people.

They do not want to spend one single penny of the money that they collect for the purchase of land and home construction. They’re not interested in that, because they consider the purchase of land and development of a Negro community as “segregating yourself.” They’d rather see the Negro with nothing than to have that kind of thing develop. They are only interested in one thing—to get into every neighborhood, but build nothing yourself.

They spend nothing for specialized training for talented youth. If it wasn’t for white philanthropists establishing foundations and contributing money for these purposes there would be no means of talented young men getting financial aid in order to educate themselves. And they’ll tell you about inequality of education. The Communist have planted the idea, “Don’t do anything for yourself, just get out there and fight and yell and scream and demand everything.”

They don’t spend a single penny for building hospitals. I remember back in the 30s there was a campaign to build a big colored hospital in Harlem. And there was an obstreperous group of white liberals and Negroes who were against it. Now here was an opportunity for them to build this hospital, that would redound to the credit of the Negro. But this small group vetoed it; said this is segregating yourselves. The Jews and everyone else build hospitals.The Negro won’t build any, and he stands off and says you’re segregating yourself when you build it!

[...]

Now the NAACP has gotten a token number of Negroes integrated in schools. They consider that a great victory, but I say it’s a Pyrrhic victory. In the first place, who said that Negroes can’t get an education in the south? Any Negro in the South who wants an education can get one. And the facilities were gradual being equalized. Who said that 130,000 Negroes were so inferior that they are incapable of teaching their own children. Now if a Negro thinks that his own people are so incapable of teaching his own children, how should they expect white people to send their own children to that inferior Negro teacher? Unlikely. And I wouldn’t let the Supreme Court or anyone else put the stigma of inferiority on teachers of my own race. Sometimes I think that they’re only concerned because a socialist radical came over here and wrote a book on the American Dilemma that—Gunnar Myrdal—that the only way you are going to get equal education is for a Negro to sit beside a white child—Negro child to sit beside a white child.”

Here, you have Black parents who interested enough in their child’s education to search for better options (according to the article, about 50,000 kids are on the waiting list for these charter schools) and the NAACP wants to keep the shackled to a failing system. They (NAACP) have barked for more minority teachers…GOT ‘EM. They have barked for more minorities in school administration… GOT ‘EM. All of the experiments have failed these kids and the parents, but the NAACP has chosen to heel.

Bad dog! Bad dog!

Drop the NAACP from that title. This is what happens when you do a post at 1am.

What this current administration is doing on this issue is a recipe for guaranteed low achievement within the Black community.

DAYTON — The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.
It’s a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.
Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.
Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two.
The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That’s the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’.

Our history is RICH with Blacks who beat insurmountable odds to gain acceptance into medical, law, and Ivy league schools. These individuals had to get good grades in a broken school system that cared nothing for Black children. No computer labs, no shinny McGraw Hill text books. Despite poverty and Jim Crow, there were Blacks that rose up and were able to compete on the same level of their White counterparts. For these Black folks, grades were not the problem. It was a system that did all it could to keep us out.

Yale’s First Black Graduates

Richard Greener. First Black Harvard graduate.

African-American Veterinarians at Cornell 1910-1920 (One was 14 years old when he entered the school)

Elbert F. Cox, first Black Mathematics Ph.D.

The list goes on and on.

The question I have is were the standards lowered for the Obamas as they both attended Ivy league schools. If not, then why push to lower the standards for police officers unless you assume they are too dumb to pass a simple test?

Usually when there is a national discourse about something unrelated to race, it takes folks a minute or two to find that missing link between the current issue and your great, great, great grandma who was whipped by “Mister”. If a racial element is not being mentioned, chances are that race is a factor. All you need to do is shut up and show solidarity.

The following was taken from the report “The Achievement Gap in Milwaukee Public Schools:
Outcomes by Gender, Race, and Income Level”. It was written back in 2007.

“Increasingly, evidence suggests urban school systems fail males, especially minority males. According to one source, African-American males in MPS, for example, have a graduation rate of about 31%, and Hispanic males have an estimated graduation rate of 36%. The white male rate of graduation from MPS is estimated to be 66%, suggesting something is out of kilter for minority males, not to mention the system as a whole, one that largely serves a low-income population.

We must also note, however, that minority females, while doing better than comparable males, have not achieved at close to white female levels in the district. The MPS African-American female graduation rate is estimated at 46%, Hispanic female, 50%, and white female, 75%, in a state where the average overall graduation rate is 88.8%. Graduation is just one measure, albeit a critical one, of achievement. Thus, the question is whether the problem of low achievement is one of gender, race, or income.”

Read the entire report for yourself.

What is true is that this same trend can be seen throughout most public school districts all throughout the country. Are parents a factor in these poor results? Yes. But overall, if the system is not working (especially for Black folks), why are these teachers demanding more money? And why is the Black Obama fanbase leaving out their favorite ingredient: RACE?

POLITICS DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!