Urban Students Failing Because of Racial Oppression?

How much tax money is Arne Duncan going to waste on his Civil Rights adventure? The money that he is about to waste would be better spent creating jobs.

I'm sorry, I just don't buy Duncan's latest PR push to show that he is working to improve education in urban schools. He recently announced that he would launch dozens of Civil Rights investigations, targeting schools across the Country, suggesting that urban students aren't succeeding because their civil rights are being violated. Oh Please!!! I can't drink that Koolaid. Am I the only one who smells bullshit whenever Arne Duncan's name is mentioned? I have been skeptical about this guy ever since Obama appointed him to the post of Education Secretary. He's a Chicago crony. There were certainly better candidates for the job in my opinion. And Chicago's public schools aren't in the best of shape in case anyone hasn't noticed.

It just seems to me that Duncan is playing to the Black urban political elite with this move. He wants to go along with the same old narrative from 20 years ago. But that narrative is out of date. Sure, there are likely some cases of civil rights violations in urban schools that may be uncovered. I don't want to diminish that problem at all. There is probably an even bigger danger of civil rights violations in predominantly white suburban schools against minority students. Hispanics and others may face issues because they speak English as a second language. There may also be cases of students being steered away from certain programs. I can recall guidance counselors refusing to let me into some of the classes I wanted to get into when I first moved to rural/suburban Texas 20 years ago. To this day I don't quite understand what the rationale was. But I still received a decent education because it was a good public school system. However, I believe that these kinds of cases are probably few and far between. Certainly this is not the driving force behind failing students and failing urban schools, particularly those in Black communities. I believe that most students aren't getting into more challenging courses because they don't have the grades...they haven't shown that they can handle the work... not because they are Black. It's interesting how this point is avoided.

Duncan is using the convenient issue of race as a scapegoat, while ignoring the elephant in the room - Urban Culture/Black Culture/Hip Hop Culture and the failure of parents. Urban social norms have a much bigger impact on educational outcomes. Yes, some urban schools have mediocre teachers... that's because good teachers don't want to work in warzones or in environments where their careers are threatened in systems that tie job security to student performance. If I were a teacher in that situation I would probably choose to leave as well...for a better school in the burbs. So let's talk about the elephant in the room. Some students just don't want to learn. Is that the fault of the teacher? Some students don't have parents that are engaged and involved in their educations. Is that the teachers fault? Some students come from broken, dysfunctional families where they don't get the support that they need. Is that the fault of the teacher? Some students follow a Black Hip Hop culture that does not embrace or value education. Is that the fault of the teacher? Of course not.

Now I don't want to suggest that there are no good teachers in struggling urban public schools. You will find some of the most dedicated teachers in troubled schools (another reason not to fire them or threaten careers based merely on student test scores). The fact is, in many of these schools, certain groups of students aren't there to learn. They are there to pass time. Culture and other social factors are the biggest variables in the mix, yet they are the variables that schools have the least influence over.

Who wants to work in an environment where there is always a question about personal safety? I wouldn't do it...especially when there is no hazardous duty pay. I wouldn't teach in these schools even if the job paid more money than wealthier white suburban public or private schools. I would rather have peace of mind. You get the occasional Columbine situation in the white burbs, but most violence still takes place in urban schools. Teachers in urban schools have to deal with fights on a weekly basis. Some...on an almost daily basis. Some of these schools function more like penal institutions...with magnetometers at the doors and movements severely restricted in the hallways. And teachers are dealing with a level of disruptive, belligerent, disrespectful, and violent behavior that has never really been seen before....not like it is today. Urban youth today have almost no respect for any kind of authority. So just as a matter of course, many of these schools are out of control. I can post the youtube videos of Black "students" wreaking havoc, fighting in classrooms and teachers either being assaulted or having no way to control them.

And to aggravate the problems, you have school systems, court systems, and States that don't back up teachers who have to deal with belligerent and violent students (many of them are urban terrorists...period). Instead of supporting teachers who are trying to deal with this kind of madness everyday by giving them all of the tools and authority they need, school systems often punish them. School boards are also of no use. And the teachers not only have to deal with out of control prison inmates in training...and the possible violence from them, they also have to deal with the ignorant parents & relatives who often threaten violence. And who does the school board, the courts, and the State side with? Often with the ignorant parents....not because the parent is right...but because they see it as easier to throw teachers under the bus to avoid having to deal with parents and students who are out of control or who might cause problems for board members or administrators. It's a completely crazy system. I am constantly running across crazy stories in St. Louis regarding belligerent & violent students and their out of control parents....and most of the problems are in schools that are predominantly Black. It's the same nonsense in every big city urban school district across the Country... Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, L.A., Atlanta, D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland...you name it.

You could fill many of these urban schools with the best computers, the best teachers in the World, the best books, the best technology, and the healthiest food and I would argue that there wouldn't be much improvement academically a year later. Not as long as the other variables remain unchanged. In order for students to achieve in these schools, there would need to be a cultural paradigm shift among Blacks in this Country (and to some extent with Hispanics). Remember Steve Perry from CNN's Black In America Series? He was the Principal of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford Connecticut. Remember what he said about minority parents and their support of the students at his school? He admitted that parental support was almost non-existent.

This isn't about students not having access to education....that's a bunch of bull. And this PR move is really a slap in the face to all those who fought in the 1950's for desegregation of public schools.... those were the real battles regarding civil rights. Students today have all sorts of opportunities.

Please take a look at the Rap on Culture report that I posted a couple of years ago. (be sure to click on the pdf). The report, by PolicyBridge, looked at the impact of culture on educational outcomes. Others, like Dr. John U. Ogbu, a professor at UC Berkley, also looked at the issue of how cultural/social differences impact educational outcomes for Black students.

It's not about whether these students are capable of learning or not. We know that with the proper tools and the proper support, minority students can learn. The Harlem Children's Zone, Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Connecticut, Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Chicago, and stories from students like Steven Stafford all tell us that urban students have the ability to learn no matter what their circumstances are. It all comes down to the will to learn... the willingness to study and work hard, support from parents and teachers, and ultimately the degree to which Blacks value education.

Why are we wasting money on investigations when we know what the major issues are regarding minorities in urban schools? This issue has been studied backwards, forwards and sideways for the last 30 years. If Duncan wants to help urban students, he could start by telling Black/minority parents to turn off the damn television. But I guess that wouldn't be politically correct. He knows that the Black urban political elite - the constituency that he feels he has to keep happy- wouldn't like that very much at all.

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Additional Report from NPR

Obama's State of Anti-Americanism

President Barack Obama strutted in front of Congress and the nation last night to give his State of the Union address. This time his undeniable oratorical skills simply could not save him from the facts that have become clear in his first full year in office, facts that now have his speeches sounding more and more like skips on a broken record.

Let's start by taking a look at what his programs have actually done over the past year, and see what he said last night. Directly because of the programs and initiatives launched by the Obama administration, our unemployment rate has soared past the 10% mark for the first time in decades and our national debt has been set on course to triple over the next decade.

But what is Obama suggesting that we do as we move into his vision of the future? Spend more, go further into debt, reward cronyism and failed industries. Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress wish to throw massive amounts of good money after excessive and irresponsible amounts of bad.

The President proposed in his speech last night to "take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat." So we taxpayers, who did not want to do it in the first place, loaned money to banks. It was repaid, but now we lend that same money back out to banks? So what exactly is going to have been "repaid"?

Why again did I lend money to banks in the first place? Do you know why? To save the financial system from collapse? Really? And why do we taxpayers need to prop up any business that cannot succeed on the strength of it's own hard work, value, worth, and entrepreneurial skills? Businesses large and small have gone under for centuries. Why do we have to save some now with taxpayer dollars?

Next the President said "We can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow...There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products." Really? Why not? What does having the fastest trains in the world have to do with anything at all? If China has a train that goes 200 miles per hour, why do we need one that goes 250?

Has the President even bothered to look at every single study of mass transit in this country? All the studies show that the vast majority of these mass transit systems: buses, trains, trolleys, etc go without ridership for the majority of the day. It is only during certain peak hours that ridership is full. But the trains and buses run all day and night long, running up massive fuel, maintenance, and labor costs. And the vast majority of the public doesn't use these systems on any regular basis at all. Those are the facts.

Why do we need to build new manufacturing plants for business? If a business wants a new plant, and will benefit economically from it's construction, then why doesn't it just build one itself?

Obama then finally spoke a truth, but he spoke it in typically veiled fashion: "The only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth, and finally address the problems that America's families have confronted for years." Well, first of all, that is not exactly truth. There will never be "full employment", whatever that means. But we get the idea and the goal of creating as many decent jobs for as many people who actually want to and are able to work.

The only proven way to create long-term sustainable jobs that will make a real difference in the lives of the greatest amount of people is to get government out of the way and allow private industry to flourish with minimal restraints. Keep taxes as low as possible across the board, and keep regulation to reasonable levels that are not a result of partisan political studies or a knee-jerk overreaction to occasional errors.

But what Obama and the Democrats want to do is what is known as 'picking the winners', making the decisions as to which businesses and industries are worthwhile and valuable and worth investing in and then forcing Americans to live with their decisions. Rather than leaving the business community alone to develop products and services and allow the American dollar-paying public to decide based on their own desires.

Obama played the scare tactic by mentioning that Germany and China and India were not waiting to pour money into 'clean energy' because "they want those jobs." Which jobs is he talking about? You mean the jobs that they are creating by the pouring in of all that money? Why would Obama possibly compare what the U.S. should do to what these nations are doing? Because they are socialist (Germany), communist (China), or corrupt quasi-socialist economic (India) nations, that's why.

Obama also continues to be shameless in his attempts to embarrass Republicans into 'going over to the Dark Side' and joining with the Democrats in making these changes. He once again mentioned that "saying no" and disagreeing continuously is not a policy idea. The fact is that individual Republican lawmakers and the Republican Party leadership have put forth numerous ideas, only to be ignored or slapped down every time by the Democratic Party-controlled congress.

Republican Party politicans in Congress and the Senate have, in fact, no obligation to blindly follow the President and fall in lock-step with the Democrats to pass laws and bills and enact policies that they know will only hurt America in the long run. They are absolutely supposed to attempt to "say no" to the President and disagree with him when he is wrong, which is on almost every issue.

Republican politicians need to not only continue to stand up to the Obama policies strongly and vocally when warranted, but in fact need to more fully and substantively embrace traditional American ideals and programs which support these ideas themselves, or many will find themselves tossed out of their own offices in the coming primary elections.

Barack Obama's vision for America is nothing short of full-blown socialism. The complete destruction of the capitalist system that elevated the United States to the greatest economic levels in the history of the world and kept us there for more than a century. The reason is simple: the power and control that comes with running a state-controlled economy and a central government.

He will play all of the usual race-baiting and class-warfare games to make this happen, implying or directly saying that those who don't go along are racist or want babies to starve or the elderly to go without medical care. He will use a mass media that has become slowly and surely and almost completely infected by individuals with the same political and social beliefs as his over the last few decades.

He further called for an "investment in the skills and education of our people." What exactly does that mean? There was a time when the American educational system was the envy of the world. What changed all that? What changed it was these very liberal ideals invading the classroom and shifting our students attention away from important learning skills to forced cultural sensitivity.

For generations, American students have been historically and socially indoctrinated in the classroom far more than they have been educated. Because some couldn't or wouldn't keep up, everyone was forced to drag back to their level. And the teaching and enforcing of morality and discipline? Forget about it. If Obama wants to improve the American educational system, he needs to get the government out of the classrooms.

Finally, Obama continued to pour it on for his outrageously enormous takeover of what is already the greatest health-care system that the world has ever known, despite the fact that the large majority of the American public doesn't want any part of a government-run system. Health-care needs responsible reform, not a comprehensive government takeover and the accompanying massive cost to the tax-paying public, as Obama and the Dems are trying to force down our throats.

Right now what Obama and the Democrats have been doing for a year and continue to plan towards the future is the insinuation of the government into effective or direct control of every major facet of our lives. The only way to stop this suicidal power-grab is to reverse the political fortunes of the country as soon as possible, before things get too bad to ever reverse.

As the brilliant economist Thomas Sowell has so perfectly put it "human beings have their own individual preferences, values, plans, and wills all of which can conflict with and even thwart the goals of social experiments." What Obama and the Democrats are advocating is what Sowell calls an "open-ended demand", one that calls for "ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers."

We Americans have certainly been getting exactly what Barack Obama promised in his campaign: Change. While I personally did not vote for him, I have a hard time believing that most of those who did so were thinking about fundamentally changing the United States of America from a nation built upon the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into a socialist nation that stifles liberty and replaces the pursuit of happiness with your acceptance of whatever the government deems oughta be what you think happiness should entail.

One of today's great scholars, Dinesh D'Souza, a legal immigrant who became a White House policy advocate, stated "America represents a new way of being human and thus presents a radical challenge to the world." In describing "American exceptionalism", D'Souza called it the idea that "Americans have throughout their history held that they are special: that their country has been blessed by God, that the American system is unique, that Americans are not like people everywhere else."

If all of the polls taken in recent months are telling the truth, then the American public is starting to wake up to the fact that Obama and the Democrats are steering us away, far away, from our founding and established ideals and that very "American exceptionalism" that we have always cherished. With the continuing of God's blessings on our special experiment in democracy we can begin to remove them from office as has been happening already all across the country, reverse the damaging course upon which they have set us, and begin to reclaim our national greatness and prosperity.