December 17, 2004
W WINS ANOTHER:
New civil rights chief talks good sense to me (Stanley Crouch,. 12/16/04, NY Daily News)
We are in a new civil rights era, now that Gerald Reynolds has been chosen to replace Mary Frances Berry as the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. [...]He says education is about moving oneself out of poverty and taking advantage of the freedoms wrought by the valor of the civil rights movement, one of the most heroic aspects of our national history.
"What we must investigate," Reynolds asserts, "is what limits the quality of public education and keeps black and Hispanic students so far behind whites and Asians. We know the problems are not genetic. Is it teachers who are mediocre and sometimes incompetent, or is it lack of involvement of the students - or both? I think it is both.
"The violence in black and Hispanic communities is a civil rights issue as well, even though people don't want to talk about it as such. We need to find out the successful techniques that have worked across the country that will take black and Hispanic kids to the top as opposed to holding them at the bottom."
I agree. If we get well-researched recommendations on public education and violence from the new leadership of the Civil Rights Commission, we won't be doing too badly.
One of the numerous achievements of the Bush presidency, so far, is recasting the civil rights discussion around educational achievement. The next step is to unify blacks and Hispanics with the GOP in establishing a universal voucher system. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2004 8:22 AM
Amen! Preach it!
Public education is so dysfunctional that one is tempted to posit some evil anti-Black conspiracy, some Yakoob the magician or Protocols of the Elders of the Confederacy plotting to hold down people of color.
Think about it. The history of minority achievement has been the history of a culturation and assimilation, but just when Black people should be becoming White, they have the misfortune to struggle against an educational system which enshrines such obscenities as multiculturalism, bidialectalism, inclusion, "equity," "constructivism."
What is being done under these buzz-words staggers the imagination. Children who will need to take their places in the modern world are encouraged to revert to the ways of thinking of early iron age, or in the case of Native Americans, stone age, peoples. Basal readers feature selections extolling, inter alia, the Aztecs, who are said to have exceled in agricluture and architecture, while the part about the uses made of their wonderful pyramids is left out.
What is worst is that classroom discipline in most urban public schools is turned over to soviets of students. Schools in my city resemble nothing so much as badly run prisons, complete with forceable sodomy, shanks, and guards who allow it all in exchange for the inmates' limited cooperation.
If you think this is exaggerated, check out where the teachers in the district send their own children--anyplace but.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 17, 2004 11:24 PM