How to deal with the rude K-12 achievement gap in Los Angeles? District officials have a new solution that should be pretty popular all-around.In other news, California has the most failing schools in the nation, and we're in the top 5 as a percentage of schools. Yay!
Based on the theory that homework is more likely to be completed by kids with a secure home life and involved parents -- aka, the white middle class -- LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student's grade, beginning next month.
"The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district's mostly low-income, minority population," writes the Los Angeles Times today. The LAUSD memo is more cryptic:
"Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade. ... While some students do not have the opportunity to do homework while away from school thus failing to return assignments, for others, it is difficult to be sure that it was the student who actually did the work."
We could probably come up with a law here, so I'm claiming it as Mangan's Law of Minority Underachievement (unless someone else has already formulated it): the more minorities in America underachieve, the more achievement itself will be denigrated. The more white and Asian kids do homework and get good grades, the more this achievement will be denigrated or discounted.
Have you seen Bruce Charlton's recent post on the "Not even trying" test? If you encounter a scientist who is not even trying to find the truth, or a government policy that is not even trying to solve the problem, or an artist who is not even trying to create beauty, you know for sure that they won't.
ReplyDeleteHe clarifies in a comment that you can usually tell they're not even trying because they say explicitly what they're trying to do, in mission statements or what-not; e.g. (to quote Charlton) "using educational institutions to pursue multi-culturalism."
What you have here is a great example of Charlton's test. The LA School District is expliticly admitting that they are not even trying to educate children. Their only goal articulated in that memo is to not penalize students.
How doesn't that apply to all of scholastics? Also how is grading done? it can't be 90% tests, or that would even more heavily favor whites.
ReplyDeleteAlso how is grading done?
ReplyDeleteAttendance? Number of fights started?
L.A. Declares Homework Racist
ReplyDeleteWelcome to the neo-Bolshevist state. Probably you are familiar with the story of Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old boy who was glorified as a role model for children by the Soviet propaganda for denouncing his own father to the authorities. I guess the next step in the West is encouraging children to denounce their "involved parents" for completing their education at home. Education and shaping the minds of the young should be completely the business of the state. The new commissars might re-use Pavlik Morozov as their poster child.
Mangan: How to deal with the rude K-12 achievement gap in Los Angeles? District officials have a new solution that should be pretty popular all-around.
ReplyDeleteBased on the theory that homework is more likely to be completed by kids with a secure home life and involved parents -- aka, the white middle class -- LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student's grade, beginning next month.
Well, I'm pretty skeptical that's the main LAUSD motivation. Sure enough, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that LAUSD is almost 75% Latino and less than 10% white, and I'd guess that most of the latter aren't of white European origins, but are instead Armenians, Middle Easterners, Afghans, etc., quite possibly themselves from pretty "disadvantaged" backgrounds. So if there are virtually no "white middle class" students in LAUSD schools, I doubt the policy is really aimed at reducing their grades.
Good point, RKU. This won't impact whitey as there as so few left in the LAUSD.
ReplyDeleteLet the Asians and Arabs kvetch about this as they are smart and get good grades.
We have other problems to worry about.
it can't be 90% tests, or that would even more heavily favor white
ReplyDeleteThis is what immediately came to my mind. Without homework being counted against me, my grades would have been better since my test scores were great.
Homework isn't even graded for correctness. You get full credit for just having done it at all.
From the article:
ReplyDeletethose numbers showed that kids who tested "proficient and advanced" were not necessarily the same ones who had good study habits at home, and vice versa.
Denying the kids that are willing to grind out a GPA but only do mediocre on tests will only make low IQ students look worse.
Using homework or attendance towards a final grade is designed to help kids who wouldn't normally be able to do well otherwise, bring up their scores. I took advantage or this private high school and a public college. They're approaching it as if it's just the opposite.
ReplyDeleteYou guys remember when the Seattle public schools declared on their website that having "future time orientation" was considered racist?
ReplyDeleteSame thing here in slightly different form.
While I never returned to CA once I shouted cheers crossing the border into Mexico--err, Arizona, a long time ago, my years in Los Angeles were highly productive ones. I also saw the LAUSD inside out and this was the Sixties when CA had the best higher educ. system in the country.LAUSD was still largely white as I supervised a brand new but experimental science curriculum.I was a professor of science education at UCLA and friend of the LAPD vice-squad in their fight against porn. How's that for a combo?
ReplyDeleteAllow me to tell you that radical school reform was a major Leftist thrust into education that intended to "humanize" schools and decapitate teachers. California was GROUND ZERO with NYC right behind. Leftists were busy nationwide pushing reams of propaganda as Sidney Hook and I published the only book calling traditional education easily one of the world's best if we kept it that way. Reformers mashed us into mush but I debated them in open forums anyway. I was fearful of their forthcoming victory because it could only lead downward. I was off by a mile as the last two decades show an almost systematic dismantling of our once proud system. CA is simply the most dramatic because its fall from greatness is the most tragic fall of all.
Dennis is again perfectly on target. The linked article is typical of PC rhetoric in its failure to discuss the influence of race. There were few problems in the 60's as I freely visited LA schools using the program I implemented. They even allowed me to address large groups of eager teachers as we tried hard to install this new science program.LAUSD is now a Mexican brothel where corruption of the curriculum must be TOTAL. It is inevitable.The LA I knew is long gone.
Across the nation schools descended into chaos and vastly degraded education as blacks entered teaching as a preferred career. Here they routinely submerged white children in a socialist education paradigm with MLK(who else) as the King(pardon the pun)of American freedom. Children notoriously grow up dumber than chipmonks as they slither through the PC curriculum.Grades are fudged and teachers with "old fashioned" ideas like merit get lynched quietly. Yes, whites get lynched the white-collar way!
Homework was absolutely "normal" in my day but then children were not GODS and NAMS values were not interfering with traditional meritocratic schooling. Children and parents were expected to do their part and teachers could independently evaluate schoolwork and fail undeserving kids. To eliminate homework is another step toward a system which may never recover. Robert Wessberg is an outstanding former professor of political science at U. of Illinois who wrote BAD STUDENTS, NOT BAD SCHOOLS, a classic work of defiance against the minions opf Obama and the Left.His clear message will not resonate with the messianic movement of Obama as they "bridge the gap" via treachery and criminal malfeasance. Blacks must be brought up to snuff by any means possible and those means will be unethical and destructive. Just as Mayor Bloomberg's GREAT EXPERIMENT used fake test data, LAUSD will resort to clever deceptions to cover the inevitable poor achievement that follows from the formula of loq IQ races pushed by money, candy, and other enticements to achieve what they cannot. LOWER THE bAR is the next step but it will involve much teachery and lies. It cannot be otherwise, as Weissberg strongly points out.The Golden State has turned to iron pyrite.
This is good news. As long as whites are not being affected (or very few) the more absurd the better. At this rate even white liberals (the normal everyday kind not those obsessed with politics) will stop taking the r-word seriously.
ReplyDeleteOT: 'Greek Spring'?:
ReplyDeletehttp://euobserver.com/9/32566
"As the Greek parliament managed to narrowly pass a package of sweeping privatisation and draconian cuts to public services at the insistence of the EU and IMF, police deployed an unprecedented level of violence to suppress mass protests and prevent demonstrators from blocking the parliament."
A large, industrial public school system isn't really necessary to the elite anymore. A primary purpose for the large, industrial public school system was to train a large, industrial workforce for regimented work engaged in things like relatively skilled labor and manufacturing.
ReplyDeleteit's sexist too, but apparently there it's the girls' greater self-discipline to be blamed, oh wait...
ReplyDeleteRacist or not, homework should be limited. Government schools force parents to give up their kids for a huge chunk of their childhood. They should be allowed to at least enjoy their kids when they're finished with school. Of course, all the above only applies to healthy, normal societies, where parents care about their kids.
ReplyDeleteOT, Dennis, but it turns out that maid who DSK was alleged to have raped has not been a model immigrant. Looks like DSK is going to walk.
ReplyDeleteI was once a teacher a a low achieving minority school. The principal informed us before the end of the first marking period that students HAD to pass. Unfortunately, the principal forgot that the negative incentive of a failing grade can do wonders in motivating some who were previously unmotivated.
ReplyDeleteIt is foolish to give passing grades when they are not earned. If a passing grade can be earned without working for it, why bother to work for it?
As was said in another context: why pay for milk if you can get it for free?
WRT DSK, I suspect that the NYT and others thought that they had found the great white defendant, despite him being Jewish ...
ReplyDeleteOh well, I am sure they will keep looking.
Maybe they can find some white guys who kept a young woman as a sex slave for 8 years, if you know what I mean.
Departure from reality, on the industrial scale that we are now witnessing, can only be afforded by very rich societies, and even then it is self-limiting.
ReplyDeleteClearly the US, and the West in general, has long ago exhausted its savings and is living on borrowed money, and therefore, on borrowed time.
The only question is how are the adults are going to clean it all up, once the Leftwing juntas that now permeate the "First World"
have finally been hoist on their own petards.
Anon.
Old stuff (LOL)
ReplyDelete"How the world looks to blacks:
One point on which all blacks agree
is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”"
from http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/06/white-teacher-speaks-out-what-is-it.html
My 95+% NAM school has an explicit "no homework" policy.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for doing away with homework, but within the framework of "openly fascist" tracking (and testing - REAL testing); that is to say, tracking with a vengeance. If they can't give kids the education they need in 8 hours a day, 36 weeks a year for 13 years, without sending them home with more work, then they're doing something wrong. Kids who want homework should be able to get it via college prep tracking, obviously.
ReplyDeleteSomeone over at Moldbug's recently posted a Wikipedia link to the concept of Critical Pedagogy, which I encourage others here to read, as it relates to Mangan's post. Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
ReplyDeleteA brief search string of the following: "Critical pedagogy" site:lausd.net | site:ca.us
brings up some interesting results.
I'll restate an obvious point: you would think with all those "racist" Whites purged from the school system, and with multicultism and liberalism in full force, you'd think that LAUSD would be the apogee of educational excellence. Yet I am given to understand that this is not quite the case.
ReplyDeleteThe linked article is typical of PC rhetoric in its failure to discuss the influence of race. There were few problems in the 60's as I freely visited LA schools using the program I implemented.
It would be interested to see literacy rates from the segregation era as opposed to today's diversity era.
Wish they'd have seen the light and done away with homework when I was in school. It cut too much into the time I had available for hanging out.
ReplyDeleteAccording to them students either don't do homework at all or if it is done it's really done by the parents. Now I'm really jealous. Why didn't they tell me this when I was a kid? I would just have reassigned it to my parents on my way out the door.
He thought she was dead ... at least that was his excuse ... it would be racis to reveal the race of the man.
ReplyDeleteThey can't many white students left in the LAUSD. Most of the few "white" students in the official statistics are probably from the Middle East.
ReplyDelete"Someone over at Moldbug's recently posted a Wikipedia link to the concept of Critical Pedagogy"
ReplyDeleteYet another cancer thought up by white people. What is wrong with us?
Apropos, I recently learned "supersoakers" don't fall under the very strict zero tolerance policy against weapons in a nearby preschool.
ReplyDeleteI found that strange - they certainly look very much like guns. Must be an oversight, then.
Um, how do super soakers count as "weapons"?
ReplyDeleteAnd as for looking like guns ... I can't remember the last time I met a gun user who painted his gun that sort of color scheme.
"weapons" should read "toy weapons."
ReplyDelete(also including imaginary shooting games using your hand as a gun).
you thought i was taking issue with a pre-schools's zero tolerance policy on actual assault weapons?
Canyons trains students to be inclusive of diversity
ReplyDeleteThis fall, teams of 25 teens at each of Canyons School District’s four high schools hope to root out prejudice and build inclusive environments for all students.
On Tuesday, Canyons completed a two-day leadership training for 100 students with Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a longtime civil-rights group based in Montgomery, Ala.
The training, and partnership with the center, were born from a Canyons probe this spring into incidents of racism at Alta High. The investigation began after a junior, a white male, allegedly wore a Ku Klux Klan-like hood and made pro-Nazi references at a school assembly. A week later, two students circulated a text message showing a Klansman in front of a burning cross. All three were cited by Sandy police and referred to juvenile court.