Tag Archives: freedom

Another Thought on Racism in Education

Posted on by
Reply

Florida’s Department of Education has set race-based goals for its K-12 students (the Florida’s DoE Strategic Plan can be found here and here.  For reading, these goals are

  • Asian students: 90% reading at or above grade level
  • White students: 88% reading at or above grade level of white students,
  • Hispanic students: 81% reading at or above grade level
  • Black students: 74% reading at or above grade level
  • American Indian students: 82% at or above grade level

The math goals are

  • Asian students: 92% at or above grade level
  • White students: 86% at or above grade level
  • Hispanic students: 80% at or above grade level
  • Black students: 74% at or above grade level
  • American Indian students: 81% at or above grade level

These are not trivial differences.  Education Sector’s Director of Strategic Communications, Kristen Amundson, notes

I understand that this is recognition that students are beginning at different places—and that’s honest—but I think it is, at best, ill-advised to set different learning standards for students based on the color of their skin.

She’s being generous.  This is a blatantly racist program, and it harkens back to Woodrow Wilson’s paternalistic racism.  Some races, the Florida DoE seems to be suggesting, are just inherently inferior to others, and so they should not be held to the same standards.

Adding failure to injury, while this…policy…correctly recognizes that some groups of children start from different—lower—bases than others, it does absolutely nothing to correct those differences—which are educational, not innate capability.  Recognizing that these kids start out at different levels of preparation for school, and that much of these differences correlate with race (they also correlate with a host of socioeconomic factors—family income, family stability, and so on; these factors subsume race into them, so there’s a bit of double-counting here), makes for a useful start point.  But the Florida DoE is telling these kids that nothing will be done to help them finish school on a more-or-less equal footing with their peers.  “There’s no point in teaching you to do better.  You just can’t catch up.”

Yet the Florida School Board Association Executive Director, Dr Wayne Blanton, said this—and he was serious:

The message could have been portrayed a little clearer, but as far as racism, I see nothing in wanting to raise test scores that would be racist.  You’re trying to raise all test scores, not just in one particular group.

No, doctor, the message was portrayed quite clearly.  As clearly as your own disingenuousness.  No one is suggesting Florida is trying to raise test scores only in “one particular group.”  That’s just a cynical red herring.  What Florida is doing is providing drinking fountains, or bathrooms, to all groups—but some will be better maintained than others.

Racism in Student Selection

Posted on by
Reply

Bill Powers, President of the University of Texas at Austin, put an op-ed into The Wall Street Journal in which he attempts to defend a particular version of “affirmative” action for admission to that university.  The case on which he commented is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which is before the Supreme Court this term.  In this case, a young woman was denied admission in favor of a less qualified black student because, she argues, she’s white.

The subtitle for Powers’ piece is this:

My university once kept blacks out.  Now at Texas we ensure that their grandchildren can enter.

But what he omitted to say there is that UTA once kept blacks out for purely racial reasons.  Now UTA “ensures that their grandchildren can enter” also on racial grounds.

Before I expand on that, though, a couple of smaller points.  Powers wrote,

UT finds itself back in court superficially for the same reason—considering race in admissions—but with just the opposite motivation.

No motive can justify racism.  Woodrow Wilson’s racism was for lofty motives—poor, inferior blacks needed the protections of segregation.  Nor do the basest of motives justify it, as the Jim Crow laws demonstrated.  Racism is…racist.

Powers also wrote

[T]he fiction that will be dispelled by Fisher is that minority students are being admitted at the expense of more-qualified white students.  There are no unqualified students admitted to UT[.]

This is nothing but a non sequitur.  Admitting less qualified students at the expense of more qualified students in no way implies that unqualified students are being admitted.  Nor is this the argument Ms Fisher is making: she’s averring that race played the role, not qualifications.

But from his flawed logic, as illustrated by these minor nits, flows the larger problem.  Powers made his case thusly:

[D]iversity isn’t only acceptable but desirable in all aspects of life, especially education.  In my 38 years in the classroom, I often have seen how a diverse classroom enriches discussion, provides valuable insights and offers a deeper learning experience.

And

[W]e employ an entirely holistic review in which race is one of many factors along with leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level and community service.

With this argument, he’s demonstrated the bankruptcy of his race-based (however diffuse) admission policy.  That breadth of diversity for which he seeks—leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, work experience, family-income level, and community service—already is wide.  Moreover, those last two, family income and community service (which carry within them the diversity of communities in which his applicants live, that income is earned, and that service is performed), are alone richly diverse, and they contain ethnicity and race within them.  With that broad diversity built into his selection paradigm, there’s no need to consider race separately.  Doing so is just separate but equal papered over.

What diversity actually would accomplish, were it not for Powers’ double counting of race in  it, would be to give all disadvantaged applicants equal opportunities for access, rather than giving superior access to those belonging to Powers’ favored race.  Giving preference to race—regardless of the strength of that preference—is to give preference to race.  There’s no amount of lipstick that can be smeared on this bigotry by those who should know better that can disguise that.

Hmm….

Posted on by
Reply

According to Matthew Payne in The Wall Street Journal, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama held a rally on the University of Wisconsin campus last Thursday.  But there were conditions attached for the students’ to gain permissiontickets to attend.

In order to get a ticket for the speech, students were forced to go to Mr. Obama’s campaign website and pledge their support for the president—in the process giving the Obama campaign a gold mine of contact information in a key swing state.

Worse, the University was complicit in this:

The university even provided direct links to the website—free advertising to 40,000 students in one of Mr. Obama’s most important demographics.

Can we afford four years of a more “flexible” President, even less accountable than he recognizes himself to be today?

John Silber

Posted on by
Reply

…was, among other things, the President of Boston University and the son of an immigrant.  Here’s what he had to say in April 1996 about a bilingual America, as reprinted last week in The Wall Street Journal [emphasis mine]:

English has never been declared our official language for the simple reason that, until recently, no one doubted that it already was.  The country was established by English speakers, its founding documents and laws are written in English and its legislatures transact their affairs in English.

This is a lesson my father learned soon after he came to this country from Germany in 1903 to work on the German pavilion at the St Louis World’s Fair.  When the fair closed he went to look for work.  Walking down the street, he saw a sign saying, “Undertaker.”  Supposing this to be a literal translation of the German word “unternehmer,” meaning “contractor,” he went inside and was surprised to find himself in a room full of coffins.  Embarrassed, he concluded that it was time to learn English.

Like all immigrants seeking naturalization, he had to demonstrate proficiency in English.  It would never have occurred to him or to any of the millions of other immigrants speaking many different languages to seek accommodations such as ballots in their native tongue.  He, like them, had freely chosen to live in a country where the language was English.

This is our historic tradition.  But in 1975 Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to require bilingual ballots.  Thus the lawmakers abandoned tradition, making a change of Constitutional consequence, amending in effect the very concept of US citizenship.  The naturalization statutes presume that English is the language of US citizens.  Why else is English required for naturalization? …

In the last weeks of the Soviet Union, I visited Moscow.  I was struck, reading my visa application, to see that the Soviet government wanted to know both my citizenship and my nationality.  I found this incomprehensible, for as an American, my citizenship and my nationality are one and the same.  America is a nation based on a set of ideals and allegiance to those ideals—it’s not based on ethnicity or national origin.

What he said.

Lies of my President, Part 4

Posted on by
Reply

This is Part 4 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Here’s this little episode, reported by James Taranto, where Obama lied to the Catholic church.  Here’s how then-Archbishop, now Cardinal Timothy Dolan described a conversation and its aftermath with Obama over HHS’ mandate that insurance providers provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients, even when that coverage contradicts the religious teachings of the provider:

I said [in summary of his conversation with Obama], “I’ve heard you say, first of all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church in the United States in health care, education and charity….  I have heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do anything to impede that work and…that you take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness….  Does that accurately sum up our conversation?” [Mr. Obama] said, “You bet it does.”

The archbishop, says Taranto, asked for permission to relay the message to the other bishops. “You don’t have my permission, you’ve got my request,” the president replied.

“So you can imagine the chagrin,” Archbishop Dolan continues, “when he called me at the end of January to say that the mandates remain in place and that there would be no substantive change, and that the only thing that he could offer me was that we would have until August….  I said, ‘Mr. President, I appreciate the call.  Are you saying now that we have until August to introduce to you continual concerns that might trigger a substantive mitigation in these mandates?’  He said, ‘No, the mandates remain.  We’re more or less giving you this time to find out how you’re going to be able to comply.’ “

Then there’s this cynical distortion of President Ronald Reagan’s position on tax increases, as described by Steven Hayward in Commentary.  In arguing for his permanent tax increase on a group of Americans of whom he greatly disapproves, Obama cited this from Reagan:

Would you rather reduce deficits and interest rates by raising revenue from those who are not now paying their fair share, or would you rather accept larger budget deficits, higher interest rates, and higher unemployment? And I think I know your answer.

As Hayward pointed out, what Reagan was talking about was this: all the “tax increases” to which Reagan agreed were temporary excise hikes on cigarettes and telephone calls and technical changes in the tax code (such as the elimination of depreciation schedules and the reduction of tax credits and deductions).  Moreover, Reagan refused to accept any rollback or other alteration to the reduced tax rates he’d already fought so hard to win.  Even in the ensuing recession.  Especially in the ensuing recession.  But that’s OK, there’s nothing like a remark taken out of context and then distorted further by its present usage.