Amitai Etzioni

I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!… To Learn That DEI Policies Harm Black And Hispanic Students!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back when the Great Stupid was really picking up steam in 2020, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it would be overhauling how students will be evaluated as part of a larger “a larger effort to combat racism.” The school board voted unanimously to eliminate yearly grade averages. Meeting deadlines for assignments and classroom behavior would not affect academic grades. The district decided to de-emphasize discipline and penalties for cheating.

This crack-brain approach to education, essentially rejecting everything that had been learned over centuries about how students learn, was justified as way to eliminate the accumulated deficits of “systemic racism.” Soon “Diversity Equity Inclusion” budgets exploded and almost every school system jumped on board the latest fad. This was reparations, not education; no respectable research supported the theory that holding minority kids to lesser standards would help them succeed, but never mind: Fact Don’t Matter to ideologues and race-hustlers.

Now come Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy with a study suggesting that black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in the school guided by diversity officers than those schooled in districts without one.” Minority students lost more ground than their white classmates, especially in math, the researchers found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.” Of course they did: having an official directing policy who insists that black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students—must combat that structural racism!—was guaranteed to undermine minority student success.

The news gets worse: nearly half of the school districts with at least 15,000 students employ a chief diversity or equity officer, and the number is 89% for districts with more than 100,000 students, the study found.

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If The Last Post (About Emerson College Promoting Anti-White Racism) Bothered You, Samuel L. Jackson Has A Suggestion Before You Read This One…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In Illinois, Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. Let me repeat that…

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

This is called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading.” It’s transformative, all right. It is a great way to transform black students into societal cripples who cannot master what many behavioral scientists believe are the most crucial skills for life success, because they are given an institutional pass.

This ridiculous and divisive concept is, of course, yet another effort to eliminate persistent discrepancies between racial groups by pretending that they are caused by racism, and lowering standards so everyone has an equally low bar to clear.  OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionately hurt the grades of black students, like for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in  assignments. This will, you know—don’t they know?—set up black students to skip work, misbehave in other settings, and fail to complete their assigned jobs and tasks. Continue reading →

Scary Tales Of The Great Stupid: San Diego Schools Decide That To Fight Racism, Character And Education Have To Go

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Triple facePalm

Oh, yes, this will work out well.

Seldom have social upheavals combined with irresponsible propaganda resulted in more devastating mass amnesia by institutions regarding well-settled reality than “The Great Stupid,” now playing in your community and mine. Joining advocacy for such self-evident disasters as open borders, eliminating police, self-declared childhood gender flips and re-segregation is the decision to eliminate basic standards in education because educators can’t seem to explain stubborn racial gaps. Make everyone equally ignorant, unethical and undisciplined! Brilliant!

I’m not exaggerating; I wish I were. The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it is overhauling how students will be evaluated because “teachers fail minority students more than White students.” Since the possibility that the reasons for this persistent problem may rest within minority culture and society pathologies rather than failures of the educational system is unpalatable to the Left and politically incorrect, the proscribed solution is to overhaul the way students are graded as part of what school board members call  “a larger effort to combat racism.”

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” says SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.” Thus the school board voted unanimously last week —unanimously; think about that— to make sweeping changes. There will be no yearly grade averages. “Things like” turning work in on time and classroom behavior will not affect academic grades, but will only count toward a so-called “citizenship grade.” On the docket for reconsideration in an upcoming meeting: de-emphasizing discipline and penalties for cheating.

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