The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Here are six nuggets picked from around the web. Find your own dippin’ sauce!

Cobb county, Georgia adopts the “everybody’s a winner” grading system.

Some Cobb County parents plan to plead with the school board Thursday night to scuttle a move to standards-based report cards for third-graders, arguing that a 3-2-1 grading scale promotes mediocrity.

[...]
The traditional A, B, C and F grading system still applies in Cobb’s fourth through 12th grades, but younger students are graded on specific skills and given the top rating of a “3” if they meet standards “consistently and independently.”

A group of parents, calling themselves the Committee for Informed Parents of Cobb County, is trying to block a proposal to expand the standards-based report card to the third grade for the coming school year, calling the report card an “unproven and unresearched fad.”

“We’re opposed to the ideology behind it, and that’s to push everybody to the middle, so nobody feels bad,” said Christy Kown, one of the committee’s co-chairs and the parent of two Cobb County students, a second-grader and a sixth-grader.

Too bad the REAL world does not operate on the 3-2-1 grading scale.

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Raise taxes on the rich, they move away, everyone pays, hey, hey hey!

Here’s a two-minute drill in soak-the-rich economics:

Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates. (more…)

(h/t: purpleAvenger)
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Dexter wonders why Black folks aren’t getting broke off under Obama.

Get wind of this. Did you know part of the stimulus package President Barack Obama signed in February called for nearly 200 million dollars to be distributed to Philippine veterans who fought with alongside U.S. soldiers in World War II? If President Obama can provide Filipino soldiers back pay he can produce dollars for African Americans whose forefathers endured bitter cruelties during slavery? (more…)

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Obama Tattoos. 

Oooookay!

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Get outta yo’ self-made prison, sis!

Do Minority Journalists Face Additional Challenges When Using Social Media Sites?

Personally, I wonder how my participation in these networks fares considering I’m a young African-American writing about race and ethnicity for a publication whose readership is older and mostly white.

Some readers discriminate based on reporters’ bylines. What happens, then, when these reporters post information about themselves on social media sites? Do they open themselves up to even greater criticism?

If I comment about my love of R&B and hip-hop when an act is coming to town, would it offend readers who may consider hip-hop to be “anti-mainstream”? What if I disputed readers’ comments about the local NAACP branch being “racist” because it had challenged an area school district for allowing students to create a KKK board game as part of a research project? My viewpoint would be very different from theirs. How does this translate?

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You would think that after Katrina folks would think twice about trusting the government to “fix” anything.
PEOPLE NEVER LEARN!

Fannie Program Sees 70% Recidivism