October 22, 2012

How to fix Barack Obama? The Obama Administration has a plan: more quotas and less discipline

Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy is a shiny new $79 million public middle school with 1,154 students in Los Angeles, complete with a school spirit song:
Barack Obama Global
Preparation Academy
Preparing us for the future
Our alma mater you'll always be
For your dedication
To our education
We'll always have and loyalty
For Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy (2x)
Soaring like an eagle
Above our beloved academy
Developing in our character
And in our integrity
If we believe it
We can achieve it
Our dreams become reality (reality)
Thanks to Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy
Thanks to Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Barack Obama
Global Preparation
Academy

Unfortunately, some people are lacking in school spirit. Here's the lone parent's review of Barack Obama on GreatSchools.net:
hi my dauther goes to this school i dont think that for the first year it went good at all the with staft and teachers they didn't had no control on the students i dont now what happen with our principal she was good when she was in forshay with our students on deciplem now the students get to schhool late and they close all the bathroom during classes so when they need to go they can find them open when they switch to another class so they arrive late to class the teachers close there doors and dont let them in even if they see the student running to class 

(By the way, this handy GreatSchools website also informs parents that the nearest comparable school to Barack Obama is: 
W.D.M Islamic Learning Center/S.C.M.S 
0.2 miles

As we saw with the Bush Administration's embarrassing 2003 failure to find any W.D.M.'s in Iraq, many Islamics haven't learned enough yet about how to make W.D.M.'s. So, it's good to see that somebody is working with the next generation to get them up to speed W.D.M.-wise, because I believe the children are our future.)

According to the architect of Barack Obama, the project cost for this 170,000 square foot school on 7 acres was $78,900,000. Capacity of the school is 1,400 students, although they seem to be having trouble getting that many to show up.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported on October 19:
Sharette Arnold simply wanted a safe place for her twin boys. 
Fearful of gangs trolling ["Cool story, bro"] her South L.A. neighborhood and dismayed at her sons' falling grades, Arnold took advantage of a less-publicized part of Choices. 
She pulled her sons out of the underperforming Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and enrolled them in Hale Charter Academy, a high-achieving campus in Woodland Hills where Cameron and Delion McDonald are thriving. 
"Our neighborhood school is new and named for Obama, but it's in a very bad area," Arnold said Friday. "My kids had to walk past prostitutes and gang members, and there were a lot of issues at the school that made it hard for them to concentrate. 
"My babies deserve better." 
Obama Academy is one of nearly 450 Los Angeles Unified campuses designated as Program Improvement Schools because they've fallen short of academic targets for two consecutive years.

Barack Obama has only been open for two years.

Fortunately, the Obama Administration has a plan to fix what's wrong with Barack Obama: namely, too much discipline. From the Center for Public Integrity:
Alexander Johnson arrived at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy to pick up his 12-year-old after school on May 19, 2011.

It's actually "Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy," which is probably wise. The word "preparatory" is practically impossible for anybody in America to pronounce reliably since the death of William F. Buckley Jr.

By the way, have you noticed how schools usually aren't called schools anymore? And the more words in the title of the school, the more doubtful the enterprise, kind of like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Practically the only school with a simple name to start up in Southern California in this century was Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, which is where people like Wayne Gretzky, Will Smith, and Joe Montana send their kids. There may be a connection.
When his son, A.J. didn’t appear, Johnson went inside the Los Angeles middle school. What he found was devastating. 
A.J. and a friend had gotten into a physical altercation over a basketball game, and school staff had summoned not parents, but police officers. Neither boy was injured, and the school ended up suspending his son for only one day, Johnson said. But officers wrote up a court citation and decided, on the spot, to also handcuff and arrest A.J. as the alleged aggressor — after what Johnson believes was only a cursory look into what had happened. 
Despite Johnson’s pleas for another solution to what the citation said was a “mutual fight,” officers drove A.J. to a station, booked him, fingerprinted him and took a mug shot before releasing him. The family hired a lawyer, and school staff later apologized. But Johnson and his wife still can’t comprehend why school officials got police involved. And while school police say they have a duty to fight crime, the Johnsons can’t help but think that officers arrested their son because of snap judgments about African-American kids in South Central Los Angeles. 
“He’s got good grades and he’s never been in trouble,” Johnson said he kept telling police. “Tell it to the judge,” he said police replied.  
An anti-school discipline protest in L.A.
What happened to the Johnsons’ son is the type of incident — in Los Angeles and elsewhere — that has the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and a growing number of juvenile-court judges deeply concerned. In fact, the issue of police citations has been included in a federal review of discipline-reform plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District – under pressure to reduce high rates of suspensions of black students — was required to submit earlier this year to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. 
“Generally speaking, in all but the most serious cases we would hope that district officials review a range of options … before referring students to the court system,” the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, told the Center for Public Integrity in an interview that touched on both Los Angeles and national trends.   

Russlynn Ali, another member of the Obama Administration's West Indian coterie (Trinidadian subcon version?), is all very fine as a civil rights spokesmodel, but it's just not been the same since Xochitl Hinojosa left the Obama Administration for that campaign job in Nevada.
Months ago, the Los Angeles district failed to submit any records of police citations or arrests of students to Ali’s office so they could be included in the office’s most recent mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection. The collection of those 2009-2010 statistics from most U.S. schools was an unprecedented attempt by the Education Department to assess an apparent national upsurge in referrals of students to law enforcement.    
Los Angeles’ data and New York City’s, too, were conspicuously missing. But in April, the Center for Public Integrity and a Los Angeles civil rights group, the Labor-Community Strategy Center, obtained and analyzed a large portion of the L.A. data that Ali’s office had expected to get.    
The data — obtained through a public records act request — contained tens of thousands of citations to lower-level juvenile court issued by Los Angeles Unified’s own police force from 2009 through 2011. 
The data don’t include arrests, which are recorded separately, or separate citations that officers referred directly to a higher-level delinquency court, where Johnson’s son ended up. The data don’t include tickets written by city police either. 
But the citations do likely represent the bulk of police-student interactions, and reveal how pervasive the ticketing of students has become in this large metropolitan district, which is struggling with high dropout rates and budget cuts.   
The Center found that Los Angeles’ school officers, part of the largest school police force in the country, issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old over three years. That worked out to about 30 citations a day, every day.   
More than 40 percent of these court citations were to kids 14 and younger, mostly for disturbing the peace, followed by daytime curfew violations, including tardiness, and scattered tickets for cigarettes, lighters, marijuana, vandalism or having graffiti “tools,” such as a Sharpie. Black students, about 10 percent of the district’s student body, received 15 to 20 percent of all tickets, depending on the year, and Latino students, 74 percent of enrollment, also received a disproportionate number.  

Can't be too disproportionate: the maximum arithmetically possible is that the 74 percent of students who are Latinos get 80 to 85 percent of the tickets.
Additional Center analysis also shows that these lower-level court citations were highly concentrated in low-income areas where children of immigrants and African-American families attend school.

You think?
Last year, there were more than 25 middle schools in such areas where at least 50 citations to lower-level court were given to students, many of them 11 and 12 years old.  At least a dozen of those schools showed 70 or more tickets issued to students, who were overwhelmingly black and Latino. 
After initial findings from the data were disclosed in media reports in late April, students and parents held protests in early May. The Labor-Community Strategy Center urged that the district cut tickets by 75 percent and adopt a moratorium on citations until more studies were done. District police officials declined to stop ticketing, but have engaged in community discussions about reforms.     
Ali said she couldn’t comment directly on “independently gathered” Los Angeles statistics. But, she said, “the data you cite reveal, and the recent Civil Rights Data Collection data show nationally, that students of color are disproportionately disciplined.” 
In March, Ali’s office revealed the results of what it had gleaned from districts nationwide that had complied and submitted their arrest and citation numbers for 2009-2010. The findings were stark: Black students, 18 percent of enrollment, represented 42 percent of school-based referrals to police. Latinos, 24 percent of enrollment, were 37 percent of school-related arrests. 
“While the magnitude of the problem is something those of us involved with civil rights enforcement have been keenly aware of, I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that I found the data surprising and disturbing on a personal level,” Ali said. 

Ms. Ali doesn't seem to know what the word "magnitude" means. It's not actually a synonym for "direction."
“Mind you,” she said, “racial disparities revealed by data alone don’t constitute a civil rights violation . . . But at minimum, they should certainly be cause for concern and lead to conversations about why the disparities exist and what can be done to ensure fair learning opportunities for all students.” 

A courageous conversation, as Eric Holder, another West Indian, might say.
Ali’s office has offered aid to help districts comply with another upcoming request that’s part of a new national collection of data. ... 
Civil rights groups fear that because of this concern for safety, ironically, black, Latino and low-income students are being subjected to unequal police scrutiny over minor matters and more searches than kids in affluent areas.    
Zoe Rawson, an attorney with the Labor-Community Strategy Center, who has defended students in court, said: “We are both policing students of color differently because they live in these areas and rely on the public education system, and we are using the police and the courts as a punitive tactic for school discipline despite evidence that it is ineffective, harmful and wasteful.” 
... The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three. The impact was greater for a student who was only marginally delinquent.   

Correlation does not imply Caucasian.
Some of Los Angeles’ inner-city schools have struggled with dropout rates as high as 50 percent. The citations examined by the Center were concentrated at those schools, as well as at middle schools that feed students into those secondary schools. ... 
Christopher Ortiz, the district’s school operations chief, said in a more recent interview that school administrators are told that that the role of school police is clear: “School police do not do classroom management.” ... 

I've been trying to point out for years that public schools need a level of disciplinarians in between teachers and SWAT teams in body armor. If you want smart teachers who like thinking about how best to teach The Great Gatsby or the Quadratic Formula more than they like thinking about how to put punks in their places, you need to back teachers up with Assistant Deans of Discipline, guys with necks wider than their heads who live to put punks in their places.
Up to now, most kids in Los Angeles with lower-level citations have been summoned to an “informal” juvenile court. They must appear with a parent during court hours, which means students miss school and the parent misses work. Students can face hundreds of dollars in fines, and if they don’t show up to court – many are afraid to tell parents about a ticket – their infraction has a misdemeanor offense added on. ... 
Jerod Gunsberg, the Johnson boy’s attorney, said that it took six months to get that 12-year-old’s assault charges dismissed in delinquency court. Gunsberg said a probation officer told him she didn’t understand why A.J.'s case was in that court, but that he wasn’t the first student to be referred from his school. 
The court put A.J. into an informal diversion program of four sessions of anger-management counseling, asked him to write a book report and urged him to continue to get good grades. 
The district said no one at Barack Obama or the district could discuss the case because of confidentiality laws. Statistics show that at least 50 citations for lower-level juvenile court were issued at Barack Obama last year. 

A reader writes to explain what's going on: "Schools get a quota of how many black students they can suspend per year. By May 19, 2011 they were no doubt at their limit for the 2010-2011 school year. However, they can still call the school cops to cite or arrest troublemakers."
The Johnsons pulled A.J. out of Barack Obama for a while, but had to drive him a long distance to a more affluent school in Santa Monica. They noticed there were not a lot of police cars patrolling there. At Barack Obama, when his son got into his first fight, “it all went south when police got involved,” Alexander Johnson said. “They didn’t have anyone to handle discipline, and they told me everything goes straight to police.” 
The Johnsons put A.J. back in Barack Obama this year, and the school welcomed him back, his parents said, and assured them that a new staffer had been appointed to handle discipline. 
Gunsberg said that, unfortunately, even though charges were dismissed and A.J. was not required to formally admit to any wrongdoing, his mug shot and fingerprints remain on file with police until he can try to have them sealed in five years or when he turns 18. 
Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.
Meanwhile, Hans Bader of Open Market reports that the Obama Administration is even farther along than with Barack Obama in fixing up what's wrong with Oakland's public schools, which is, coincidentally enough, too much discipline:
Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions; suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” ... These “targeted reductions” are racial quotas in all but name. (“Disparate impact” is when a process affects one racial group more than another, despite having no racist motive, such as when whites have higher average scores than minorities on a standardized test.)

By the way, I want to congratulate Hans Bader on really turning his life around since that unfortunate 1988 incident at the Nakatomi Plaza office tower. I guess one night of rehabilitation with Officer John McClane, NYPD, was all it took. Let that be a lesson to us all.

75 comments:

  1. i thought this was the tune for the obama school song

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U06jlgpMtQs&feature=related

    but it didn't fit

    so then i tried it with this

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQjX1h8VuWA

    worked great

    ReplyDelete
  2. "i dont now what happen with our principal she was good when she was in forshay"

    Forshay? This review is approaching incomprehensible but it sounds like there is a major crisis with locked bathrooms at the school. All else is fine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three. The impact was greater for a student who was only marginally delinquent."

    What do they mean by "increases"? That if a student has to go to court, it's pretty good evidence that the student will eventually drop out? Or did they do a randomized controlled trial, where they randomly sent some students to court and didn't send others to court, and found out that going to court was the causal factor?

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Johnsons pulled A.J. out of Barack Obama ...

    I see you shiver with anticipation.

    Do all U.S. high schools have songs? So Grover Cleveland will have an anthem in his name at the eponymous establishment, as will Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Richard Milhous Nixon, Andrew Johnson, Jimmy Carter etc.

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  5. "forshay" is a reference to the James A. Foshay Learning Center -- i.e., another school.

    Schools are never named "school" anymore.

    The only exception I can think of among newish schools is Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, CA where Will Smith, Wayne Gretzky, and Joe Montana have sent their kids.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Steve, that was a very funny post. What's wrong with Barack Obama, WMDs, too much discipline - all of your jokes worked and the lone parent's review was absolutely hilarious.

    ReplyDelete
  7. At first I was pissed at the idea of a politician still in office (still alive, really) having a school named after him.

    But the idea that we'll get to see a school named the "Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy" fail miserably is too much to miss out on. $10 that embarrassed socialists get them to rename the school within a decade.

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  8. Let me get this straight, after a baseline number of murders are committed by members of a group with too many murder complaints, no more murders will be punished.

    goatweed

    ReplyDelete
  9. Cail Corishev10/22/12, 6:00 PM

    That parent's review has to be fake. It's just too perfect to be true.

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  10. Barack Obama Global
    Preparation Academy
    Preparing us for the future
    Our alma mater you'll always be



    LOL!!!!

    I almost cried I laughed so hard!!!

    Preparation A!!!!

    ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

    Obama Preparation A will always be like our mama's titty!!!!!


    ReplyDelete
  11. I want to hear what Cornel West has to say. I'll bet it's lively and stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  12. That one high school had a 10% black and a 74% hispanic student body.

    16% was something else, presumably white but I don't know enough about LA to say.

    Probably the 16% is lying low until they get released.

    Must be tough to be a black kid at that school.

    How de facto segregated are LA schools anyway?

    And as another thought, maybe the administration of that school really is lazy. I mean it is pretty convenient to refer all discipine problems to the police.

    Sounds like a dysfunctional mess and everyone has thrown in the towel. I wonder if referring everything to the police is out of the gentrification handbook?

    Then again maybe the people who organize the schools there are so purified and evolved that any violence must be referred to the police. Or maybe it's the possibility the kids may be armed.

    Pretty crap situation. I'd leave and be a greeter at Walmart.

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  13. I thought they do this after a President has left office and usually after they have passed away. I guess no tradition is too high not to piss away on the Mulatto Empty Chair on High who's done nothing but f'up the whole time he's been in office.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Weather.

    Other than that, why are you living in LA?

    ReplyDelete
  15. I looked at the review by the dauther's muvher. Really, who thinks Baby Daddy knows where his dauther even goes to school? On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, here is how she rated Obama Prep:

    Overall rating = 1 star
    Teacher quality = 1 star
    Principal leadership = 1 star
    Parent involvement = 3 stars

    Based on 1 rating

    I think she shows quite a bit of humility. I wonder what she thinks she could be doing better. Oh, I know, she probably has a job and thinks she could be more involved if she was on welfare. Then she'd give herself 5 stars.

    That review will soon be removed, once someone sees that it has been posted here. Share it while you still can.

    ReplyDelete
  16. The move to leave delinquent behavior unpunished is only the beginning; as I noted in my blog post on homework "reform", some school districts aren't just "reforming" grading policies by leaving "behavioral issues" unpunished (grade-wise, at least) - they're killing extra credit and other things that would stimulate the gifted! It's as though the so-called "reformers" are deliberately trying to make scholastic environs a living hell for the gifted/higher IQ.

    On the disparities in crime, M.G. of Those Who Can See has an interesting post on that...

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  17. I like how you left the forshay unexplained in order to bait your readers, and of course they took your bait. That's your true genius Steve.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "W.D.M Islamic Learning Center/S.C.M.S"

    it is so funny my sides are splitting!!!!

    WDM? like WMD?

    Lookie mommy, it's the WMD Islamic Learning Center!!

    ReplyDelete
  19. I guessed 'forshay' was another school but it was nice to have it confirmed.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Nelson:

    The move to leave delinquent behavior unpunished is only the beginning;

    That is not a new thing: selective enforcement of deliquency rules - i.e. making low IQ kids unaccountable to any rules - in a mixed IQ school environment. The result is a disaster mainly for the smart students, and generally for everyone. Anarchy for the dummies, fascism for the smarties.

    I can see putting all the "slow" kids in their own school, and letting anarchy reign, on the grounds that they are totally unable to understand rules. I can see putting the smart kids in their own school, and having a loose system of fairly-enforced rules on the grounds that they are smart enough to handle a pair of scizzors without causing mass megadeath. There is a certain sense to tracking and (let's call a spade a spade) intellectual segregation.

    Imagine a 250-pound 17-year-old with a mental age of 5 allowed to be as disruptive as possible, to destroy and vandalize school property, often with more malice and less innocence than credited. He goes to the science lab and smashes up microscopes that he will never use. He sets fires. He steals and destroys the property of the school, and other students. He takes a dump in the library, and smears his feces on the "geek books".

    He also bullies and assaults kids much younger and smaller than he is; and the victims are not allowed to defend themselves. The smart kids especially, are required to set an example, and can be suspended or expelled if they fight back.

    as I noted in my blog post on homework "reform", some school districts aren't just "reforming" grading policies by leaving "behavioral issues" unpunished (grade-wise, at least) - they're killing extra credit and other things that would stimulate the gifted!

    Truly gifted children don't need extra credit or other band-aids. They need separate gifted school of their own, whether public, private, or charter. I am sure that $78,900,000 could build quite a few of those.

    It's as though the so-called "reformers" are deliberately trying to make scholastic environs a living hell for the gifted/higher IQ.

    How many educrats are gifted themselves?
    How many educrats wrongly believe that gifted children (and adults) are just normal sheeple with extra brain cells tacked-on?
    How many educrats are aware of the special intellectual and emotional requirements of gifted children?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Lookie mommy, it's the WMD Islamic Learning Center!!

    The Hussein WMD Islamic Learning Center?

    ReplyDelete
  22. At first I was pissed at the idea of a politician still in office (still alive, really) having a school named after him.


    George Bush has at least one high school named after him as did Bill Clements. Clements high school was named for him 18 years before he died. Bush HS was named for him in 2001. As far as I know, he is still alive. Bush also has big honking Nimitz class super carrier named after him which cost $6.2 billion. That is more than BO high school.

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  23. Is there no limit to the amount of money that liberals think should be spent on public schools?
    it would be cheaper to send all the kids to European or Asian schools. But these parents would soon find out to their horror that tracking students from an early age is common in Europe and around the world.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Auntie Analogue10/22/12, 7:43 PM

    Each passing day further confirms Diana West's argument that our nation's failings are consequences of 'The Death Of The Grownup.'

    ReplyDelete
  25. Cail Corishev10/22/12, 7:49 PM

    "How many educrats are gifted themselves?"

    From the classic movie about smart kids, Real Genius:

    "My teachers used to hate me because I was smarter than they were." That pretty much sums up the educrat attitude toward gifted students.

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  26. "Thanks to Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy
    Thanks to Barack Obama...."

    Interesting how the old school song also serves as a paen to our beloved leader - he, who bade the oceans recede, becalmed the anxious hearts of the multitude, and from whose benevolent eyes shines the radiant light of our magnificent future! Glory! Glory!

    This is why why I always vote against any funding for public education. Let the whole rotten ediface collapse, I say. There's nothing in it for us anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  27. "Bush also has big honking Nimitz class super carrier named after him which cost $6.2 billion."

    I'm sure the crew are more grateful for their ship than the parent is for her school. And, I guarantee there is more learning going on in the ship.

    ReplyDelete
  28. After looking at the BOGPAC's website, I checked Google Maps Street View, since I still wasn't sure this wasn't an elaborate joke. There was a police car parked in front of the school.

    What is a 'mutual fight', some kind of libertarian fracas?

    ReplyDelete
  29. "The Center found that Los Angeles’ school officers, part of the largest school police force in the country,....."

    How long has the LAUSD had its own police force? Do they have a SWAT team too? No self-respecting police force can be without a SWAT team! I'm sure a Homeland Security grant could fix them up with one.

    "The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three."

    What was all that about correlation and causation again? How could any study possibly measure such a thing? What controls would they use? Sounds like a crock.

    ReplyDelete
  30. "robert61 said...

    What is a 'mutual fight',"

    A dynamic learning experience.

    ReplyDelete
  31. @Anonymous 7:24PM:

    That is not a new thing: selective enforcement of deliquency rules - i.e. making low IQ kids unaccountable to any rules - in a mixed IQ school environment. The result is a disaster mainly for the smart students, and generally for everyone. Anarchy for the dummies, fascism for the smarties.

    Tell me about it. Went through it myself - bullied in middle school; when I got pissed and retaliated, I got in trouble while they (mostly) got away with it.

    I can see putting all the "slow" kids in their own school, and letting anarchy reign, on the grounds that they are totally unable to understand rules. I can see putting the smart kids in their own school, and having a loose system of fairly-enforced rules on the grounds that they are smart enough to handle a pair of scizzors without causing mass megadeath. There is a certain sense to tracking and (let's call a spade a spade) intellectual segregation.

    Won't happen without first replacing current standardized tests with standardized *psychometric* tests adjusted for age/grade level. However, based on reactions to DC, VA and FL going psychometric with their standards, even this is unlikely - for now...

    Imagine a 250-pound 17-year-old with a mental age of 5 allowed to be as disruptive as possible, to destroy and vandalize school property, often with more malice and less innocence than credited. He goes to the science lab and smashes up microscopes that he will never use. He sets fires. He steals and destroys the property of the school, and other students. He takes a dump in the library, and smears his feces on the "geek books".

    He also bullies and assaults kids much younger and smaller than he is; and the victims are not allowed to defend themselves. The smart kids especially, are required to set an example, and can be suspended or expelled if they fight back. (Emphasis mine.)


    Kinda ironic how there was a huge anti-bullying uproar post-Clementi but now these moves implicitly encourage such...

    Truly gifted children don't need extra credit or other band-aids. They need separate gifted school of their own, whether public, private, or charter. I am sure that $78,900,000 could build quite a few of those.

    I'm warming up more and more to this idea; standardized psychometric exams would help. Thing is, absent these means, we'll continue to have mixed-IQ environs and we still need a means to signal such potential; in that sense, things like extra credit or "extra challenging" assignments are still useful IMHO.

    How many educrats are gifted themselves?
    How many educrats wrongly believe that gifted children (and adults) are just normal sheeple with extra brain cells tacked-on?
    How many educrats are aware of the special intellectual and emotional requirements of gifted children?


    Not enough, unfortunately, :-(

    ReplyDelete
  32. This "Obama Leadership Academy" is gloriously diverse:

    In its first academic year (2010-11):
    Nonwhite students: 1,230 (99.84%).
    White students: 2 (0.16%).

    Total diversity was within reach!

    Unfortunately, diversity is on the decline: There are now 15 Non-Diverse (Colorless) students.

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  33. Has it really come to that? Separate out high IQ kids from the masses? I know it kind of works out that way already in a lot of areas, but still...

    Kind of drives a stake in the heart of any ideal of what this country should be like. Everyone always thinks their kids are above average, but what do you do when they aren't selected for a school like this? Cancel the rest of their life?

    Heck of a long way from the 1950's. This would be a large step towards stratifying this country more than it is now, which takes some doing.

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  34. Difference Maker10/22/12, 9:22 PM

    How many educrats are aware of the special intellectual and emotional requirements of gifted children?

    They want you to fail, and so do the powers that be.

    ReplyDelete
  35. @sunbeam:

    Has it really come to that? Separate out high IQ kids from the masses? I know it kind of works out that way already in a lot of areas, but still...

    Kind of drives a stake in the heart of any ideal of what this country should be like. Everyone always thinks their kids are above average, but what do you do when they aren't selected for a school like this? Cancel the rest of their life?


    I certainly wouldn't advocate "canceling the rest of their life;" as is oft mentioned IQ isn't the sole determinant of success (for instance, there are many career fields where one can thrive even without exceptionally high IQs).

    Also, despite having higher crime rates on average, there are many more law-abiding Blacks/Hispanics than there are criminals/delinquents. However, methinks there's a real danger when cats advocate light to no punishment for behavioral problems because the meting out of such is racially disparate...

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  36. I wonder how the discipline team at Fullerton many years ago would have handled this. They were plenty scary enough for white kids. One was named Mr. Kill. You didn't want to have to go to his office. The other was a swarthy guy named Louis Armijo. You definitely didn't want to see him. I didn't know if he was Mexican or what. Didn't find out until many years later that he had been a Navajo code talker during the war.

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  37. Right about now Obama's ego must be swollen to the size of the Hindenburg. Perhaps a few giant pyramids should also be built in his honor, or maybe have his visage put on some coins just like they did for that squaw some years back.

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  38. Steve, it was Hans Gruber. Sigh. I've seen Die Hard about fifty times. The second best 80's action movie ever made, the best is "Dredd" (the new one with Karl Urban, not the old one with Stallone and Deuce Bigelow).

    The problem with NAM schools is that the supply of NAM rowdies/knuckleheads/thugs is limitless, not the least of which beating people up and destroying things gets you far better girlfriends (actually KILLING someone gets you about 18 months, "respect" aka fear, and the HOTTEST girls around). While the supply of guys who live to put punks in their place is very limited.

    Moreover, there is a word for the PARENT of said punk. Voter. No putting punks in their place is possible because their single mothers (and various baby daddies) will object strenuously, perhaps riot, certainly vote the board out.

    There is not anything you can do. Stuff gets routed to police because there is no way to handle it outside of them. Only police are armed, basically untouchable, politically, and with powers of arrest. What, some tough guy is going to scare a 10 year old gangsta wannabe who has friends/family who he KNOWS has killed people? Really. Get real. Not even the school police induce fear and thus compliance, just that its the path of least resistance.

    Violence is intrinsic to the NAM ghetto/barrio, expecting schools to put a lid on it is expecting them to make kids magically smarter. Hell is being a smart kid in the barrio or ghetto which does not treat High IQ without high aggression and violence lightly.

    And frankly this is what the single mothers WANT. They WANT their kids violent, they figure better the aggressor and dominator than the victim.

    Meanwhile Nice White Ladies who dominate education (tm Steve Sailer) are as delusional about that reality as they are about national security, foreign policy, or oil (which can of course be substituted for unicorn farts and rainbows powering electric cars, and airplanes).

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  39. 2 white kids? 15 white kids? Are their really white kids in a school like this? That's who we need to hear about. Where is the documentary about them?

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  40. Vermicious Knid10/22/12, 11:29 PM

    Just goes to show that throwing money at education can have limited benefits. In the small towns and rural areas in Iowa around where I grew up, many students went to buildings that were 70-100 years old. Yet Iowa has among the best-performing K-12 students in the country. No school police, either.

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  41. Vermicious Knid10/22/12, 11:53 PM

    This is a classic example of the contorted thinking that results from mentally blocking off any explanations that might reflect badly on minorities.

    As a semi-recovering liberal I can remember thinking that way- there's no way minorities could actually be inferior about anything, so all other possibilities, no matter how tortured, had to be considered.

    I was a little smarter than these people, though. I was willing to admit that maybe blacks actually behaved in a less disciplined manner, but it had to be because of racism or oppression of some sort.

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  42. Simon in London10/23/12, 12:53 AM

    Whiskey:
    "Violence is intrinsic to the NAM ghetto/barrio, expecting schools to put a lid on it is expecting them to make kids magically smarter. Hell is being a smart kid in the barrio or ghetto which does not treat High IQ without high aggression and violence lightly."

    But chaotic, violent schools seem to be exclusively a first-world phenomenon. In African* and Caribbean countries, the schools have iron discipline and routine corporal punishment. Children may sometimes be abused by teachers, but rarely by each other. They certainly get to learn stuff. The schools are Tyrannies, not Anarcho-Tyrannies. And they're modelled on the way our schools were a hundred years ago.

    Part of the problem may be compulsory education; beyond puberty only people who actually want to be in school should be there.

    *I'm always struck by how well-educated my non-elite African students are; better than the elites of some other nations. This seems to be a successful 'Legacy of Colonialism'; they were left good primary-secondary education systems and unlike us they have maintained them.

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  43. "Steve, it was Hans Gruber. Sigh." - He changed his name duh.

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  44. "The Hussein WMD Islamic Learning Center?" - Well atleast they are learning something.

    Anarcho-Tyranny is the right word for what is happening in the school. In their bid to "close the gap" they've been basically trumping up charges against white students in mixed schools for decades. And whats the takeaway? get your kids out of that bad(not nearly all white) school, that is if you can.

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  45. Well at least it's west of the Harbor Freeway.

    p.s. SHOOT the glass!!

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  46. "I've seen Die Hard about fifty times. The second best 80's action movie ever made..."

    I'm 90% sure that I'm wrong about the following, but I've got to throw it out there anyway:

    Half Sigma loves 80s movies. And we know he's done other Web characters. I don't see anything in Whiskey's politics that would be incompatible with HS. And there's always been something over-the-top, unreal, cartoonish about Whiskey, a feeling that he might have been made up, partly for giggles, partly to push an agenda. Perhaps I'm being paranoid.

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  47. Im impressed with the lady at the anti-discipline protest. Talented, well dressed and attractive. Come gentlemen, dont be shy, she wont be on the market forever.

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  48. The school in the picture looks like a minimum security prison.

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  49. Here's another Obama school that's made the news, locally anyway, in a completely unsurprising way.

    http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/023544.html

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  50. Education departments employing whole teams of 'civil rights lawyers' schools named after fancy new buzz words eg 'academies', 'chartered', 'young leaders' academy, multi million dollar buildings, etc, etc - and I thought that the simple job of a school was to teach.

    - There's a rather nasty and current British saying, that's doing the rounds lately, and it originated in the gritty former industrial north of England, the saying is "You can't polish a turd".
    Just about says it all, really.

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  51. This seems to be a successful 'Legacy of Colonialism'; they were left good primary-secondary education systems and unlike us they have maintained them.


    They just didn't have the privilege of being able to afford the Ivy League education innovators that we got.

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  52. Why only "Global Preparation Academy", these incipient titans of commerce need to attend an institution with a grander vision, how about "Global Preparation Academy for Worldwide Success"? But then, NAMs always need a little more self-esteem, so let's try "Global Preparation Academy for Worldwide Prestige and Success". But that's too long, let's just call the place Prestige Worldwide. Perfect!

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  53. "I can see putting all the 'slow' kids in their own school, and letting anarchy reign, on the grounds that they are totally unable to understand rules."

    I think we have a separatist in the making here.

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  54. "This is a classic example of the contorted thinking that results from mentally blocking off any explanations that might reflect badly on minorities.

    As a semi-recovering liberal I can remember thinking that way- there's no way minorities could actually be inferior about anything, so all other possibilities, no matter how tortured, had to be considered.

    I was a little smarter than these people, though. I was willing to admit that maybe blacks actually behaved in a less disciplined manner, but it had to be because of racism or oppression of some sort."


    This perfectly describes the mind-set I had as recently as half a dozen years ago.

    I literally could not believe the evidence of my eyes and ears. There just had to be some other explanation for the fact that groups of black adults inevitably sounded like noisy, unruly children, not without a certain rough verbal wit, but totally lacking any grasp of the past or the future and unable not to act on whatever impulse seized them at any given moment.

    It couldn't be a lack of intelligence, it just couldn't be. It had to be something else, something so prevalent and obtrusive but so obscure that it could be sensed but not glimpsed, described but not defined.

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  55. "[Y]ou need to back teachers up with Assistant Deans of Discipline, guys with necks wider than their heads who live to put punks in their places."

    The assistant principal at my high school made this his personal mission; he seemed to enjoy it immensely. He could shout like a drill sergeant and glare like Clint Eastwood. He was one of the few authority figures in the school whom the troublemakers genuinely respected.

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  56. "Let me get this straight, after a baseline number of murders are committed by members of a group with too many murder complaints, no more murders will be punished".

    The Seattle police department is already showing it's willingness to adopt policing policies set by Obama's DOJ to limit disparate impact.

    http://rdp.defender.org/posts/11

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  57. $450 a square foot. Wow.

    Goatweed

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  58. "
    Half Sigma loves 80s movies. And we know he's done other Web characters. I don't see anything in Whiskey's politics that would be incompatible with HS. And there's always been something over-the-top, unreal, cartoonish about Whiskey, a feeling that he might have been made up, partly for giggles, partly to push an agenda. Perhaps I'm being paranoid. "

    HS is the east coast Whiskey.

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  59. How do you know all this fershlugginer stuff, Steve? I admire your research powers and I envy your subtle understated humor style. My God, this is funny. It's commented on with enthusiasm and linked here:
    Obamucation.

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  60. Imagine a 250-pound 17-year-old with a mental age of 5 allowed to be as disruptive as possible, to destroy and vandalize school property, often with more malice and less innocence than credited. He goes to the science lab and smashes up microscopes that he will never use. He sets fires. He steals and destroys the property of the school, and other students. He takes a dump in the library, and smears his feces on the "geek books".

    He also bullies and assaults kids much younger and smaller than he is; and the victims are not allowed to defend themselves. The smart kids especially, are required to set an example, and can be suspended or expelled if they fight back.


    My experience too!

    I will also remind you this is not exclusively a modern racial problem. The seeds were planted decades ago. I went to school in the 1970s along with many meantards as mentioned above. All of them were white.

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  61. The solution is de-feminizing education, firing the teachers and hiring guys who served in Afghanistan and Iraq as teachers. If they had to deal with Taliban or Sadr's militia they could deal with those kids. A school like that needs heavy discipline, and very few women are capable of providing that. One can make correlations between the rise of feminism in society and the decline of the schools. Too many people are too quick to blame immigrants and not quick enough to blame American white women, who are more responsible than any other group for our nation's decline...

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  62. How long has the LAUSD had its own police force?

    Since 1948 per wiki.

    But I went to an LA city elementary school in the 1950s, in Eagle Rock, and don't remember the presence of police at all, nor did they seem to be at my brothers' high school.

    There was, however, a boys' dean with a paddle. Part of the wood shop ritual was to make oen's own souvinir paddle and carve your name on it to hang on the wall at home.



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  63. Steve Sailer, you don't even know my name, but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child. Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne... Rambo... Marshal Dillion.

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  64. Hans, our youth probably don't know who Marshal Dillon and John Wayne were supposed to be. Probably the only kids who watch old Westerns now are gay.

    (Gilligan's Island however crosses all known ethic, religious, social, and age boundaries.)

    Rambo is almost like something from the Black and White era now.

    You are just going to have to be a little fresher, that's just how America rolls.

    You can't possibly hope to insult us unless you keep up with the trends.

    I suggest you watch Entertainment Tonight and some Reality Shows for a while. I think Honey Boo Boo might be edifying to you. There is no possible combination of words you are capable of using to make her feel bad. You'll feel words like "dialectic" come off your tongue, and she'll just look at you and say "Huh?"

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  65. "By the way, have you noticed how schools usually aren't called schools anymore? And the more words in the title of the school, the more doubtful the enterprise, kind of like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?"

    In the UK, the buzz-word is "community". You only ever see it attatched to institutions where a sense of community is absent. Never send your kids to a "Community College".

    "Democratic Republic" traditionally equalled "Communist dictatorship" IIRC. You knew such a country was certainly uncontaminated by democracy.

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  66. Gilligan's Island however crosses all known ethic, religious, social, and age boundaries.

    What about Hogan's Heroes?

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  67. Ive found the original picture of the anti-discipline lady, the menfolk of iSteve should not be deprived of this.

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  68. "Civil rights groups fear that because of this concern for safety, ironically, black, Latino and low-income students are being subjected to unequal police scrutiny over minor matters and more searches than kids in affluent areas."

    If genuinely studious kids at bad schools are adversely effected by the disciplinary measures necessary to control their unruly peers, this would be consistent with Mr. Sailer's recent statement: the problem with being poor in America is that you're surrounded by other poor people.

    I wonder whether permitting a kind of discretionary restrictive covenant for urban neighborhoods would be a boon to poor NAMs with bourgeois aspirations. The "deserving" poor could separate themselves from the dysfunctions of the ghetto. Imagine a board of concerned (mostly NAM) parents having the freedom to deny residency in their neighborhood to anybody they think would be a bad influence, disparate impact and other legalisms be damned.

    This would mean that awful, anarchic schools would be the exclusive preserve of the sort of people who make those schools so awful and anarchic in the first place. There's a certain cruel fatalism in that, but it's not like it's worse than the status quo.

    There would be a bonus advantage, too: the experience of keeping out unruly and crime-prone members of their own race/ethnicity might help to break NAM ethno-class solidarity and co-opt (some) bourgeois NAMs into the political right.

    Just a thought. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Mr. Sailer has written on this idea before.

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  69. "sunbeam said...

    Hans, our youth probably don't know who Marshal Dillon and John Wayne were supposed to be. Probably the only kids who watch old Westerns now are gay.

    (Gilligan's Island however crosses all known ethic, religious, social, and age boundaries.)

    Rambo is almost like something from the Black and White era now.

    You are just going to have to be a little fresher, that's just how America rolls.

    You can't possibly hope to insult us unless you keep up with the trends."

    - Sunbeam, you're gonna have to freshen up on the past, or you're not gonna keep up with the jokes here....

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  70. David Davenport10/23/12, 6:48 PM

    Bush also has big honking Nimitz class super carrier named after him which cost $6.2 billion. That is more than BO high school.

    Are you A B. O. Academy alumnus?

    The aircraft carrier is named for Bush Sr.:

    Official Web page of USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH (CVN 77)

    www.public.navy.mil/airfor/cvn77/Our Mission. USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH (CVN 77) will be mission ready to conduct sustained Carrier Strike Group operations and all other operations as ...

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  71. "The solution is de-feminizing education, firing the teachers and hiring guys who served in Afghanistan and Iraq as teachers. If they had to deal with Taliban or Sadr's militia they could deal with those kids. A school like that needs heavy discipline, and very few women are capable of providing that. One can make correlations between the rise of feminism in society and the decline of the schools. Too many people are too quick to blame immigrants and not quick enough to blame American white women, who are more responsible than any other group for our nation's decline..." - They sadly won't be able to machinegun unruly little brats to death, and don't in general have the skillset to deal with such kids.

    Rather than blame the teachers, we need to lay blame on administration and the educrats, who are the wellspring from which all this flows. your observation on feminization is probably true there however.

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  72. "Global preparation academy"? Isn't it racist to restrict these youths' ambitions to this planetary body? Stop this soft bigotry of low expectations! Hope, change and diversity for the cosmos!

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  73. Anon 10:43:

    More than just needing male muscle for discipline, boys with no men in their lives worth respecting urgently need to see some men acting like men, not like animals or children.

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  74. You know, the really sad part is, some large fraction of the people demanding lower standards of school discipline for black kids actually think they're doing the black kids a favor.

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