MAJOR FACTORS FOR CONTINUED MINORITY FAILURE ON COMMON CORE TEST IGNORED- WHY IS THAT?
(Mensaje se repite en Español)
In analyzing the recent abysmal showing and further decline of Black and Latino students on recent state tests designed to measure their mastery of Common Core standards, major factors seem to have been purposefully ignored in looking at these scores in order to continue a failed public education policy that is clearly responsible. Why is that? Could it have anything to do with the corporate agenda that seeks to justify the further privatization of the now close to $2 trillion a year public education "business" with privately owned or controlled charter schools designed to tap into these funds by corporations?
The greatest factor in explaining this continued poor performance of Black and Latino students on these tests is not even addressed as a factor in explaining why these students continue to fail in school and on these tests. In the continued segregation of our public schools 61 years after Brown vs. Board of Education said, "Separate but equal...is inherently unequal" and against the law, not only has segregation gotten worse, it has gotten so bad that older African Americans now often remark that the segregated all Black schools they went to were better than a de facto segregated Dorsey, Crenshaw, or Audubon LAUSD school, where failure is almost ensured and success is the miraculous exception rather than the grade-level mastery, which should be the rule.
When somebody like Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers says, "We are asking more out of our kids and I think that's a good thing" as reported by Howard Blum in the Los Angeles Times, both Blum and Minnich are clearly lying and they know it.
In school districts like LAUSD, that remain close to 90% Latino and Black, the vast majority of students, parents, teachers, and most importantly administrators have no expectation that minority children can succeed in anything but vacuous rhetoric unsupported by the rigorous time-sensitive and grade-level mastery of standards necessary to do well on assessments and in life. And despite the fact that the vast majority of success within this minority demographic takes place in the few integrated school settings elsewhere, there is no move to finally bite the bullet and integrate LAUSD.
While this unnecessarily deferred process would initially be very expensive and unpopular in what remains a society where both minority and majority continue to harbor unchallenged fantasies about each other, the financial savings and already documented success in integrated schools finally being allowed to produce a population of people capable of sustaining themselves and our society, instead of being incarcerated at greater and greater expense, would more than pay back this investment in all of our futures in a relatively short time.
But so far, anybody who challenges the status quo by seeking the timely integrated education of all students is labeled racist and "not culturally sensitive" in an LAUSD environment where socially promoting unprepared students from one grade to the next without adequate mastery of prior grade-level standards remains the rule and not the exception. In what way should we be surprised that socially promoted students without prior grade-level standards mastery subsequently fail Common Core examinations designed to measure knowledge that predominantly poor and minority students were never taught? Now that's my notion of racism!
And although there is clear and convincing evidence that other test scores like the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) and passing course grades have been fixed- school administrative cheating or intimidating teachers to do so or else- somehow people now seem surprised by the abysmal showing of Latino and Black students on these latest Common Core tests, which themselves have no hard score, but rather an arbitrary standard as to what is acceptable.
In trying to explain Latino and Black student failure within the limited parameters of not offending anybody, Inner City Struggles Executive Director Maria Brenes suggests that "LAUSD should invest more in technology." However, the foundational issue of whether these students are literate enough in English to be able to productively use such devices is never addressed. There is no question that more technology would offer greater access to information, but there still is no substitute fo the 3Rs as a necessary prerequisite for effectively using technology. This is never mentioned in the technology as fix-all panacea disussion.
Any classroom teacher will tell you that it is not a lack of technology that leads to such failure on assessment examinations, but rather too much. Virtually every student has a cellphone and ear buds to listen to their music and tune out the teacher. And as for the $1.3 billion John Deasy criminally collusive legacy of iPads that don't work, that LAUSD leadership is still trying to sweep under the carpet, they actually work pretty well in the hands of clever, if unformally educated students, who have figured out how to pass boring class time playing video games with them in lieu of doing any classwork in a language they understand very little of due to social promotion. These students are smart enough to know that they will be passed on to the next grade in any case, but understandably not educated or mature enough to understand the long term ramifications of these actions. Isn't that the adults job?
But the awful showing of Latino and Black children on the Common Core assessments does have a siliver lining for Charter school proponents, who are using these results to ask in "news" reports like the one from KPCC's Adolpho Guzman Lopez: As charter schools make top 10 test score list, should parents consider switching?
What Guzman somehow neglects to tell his reader- because he wants to keep his job- is that the school he cites as an exception to Latino and Black failure on the Common Core assessment exams only has 15 Black students and 19 Latinos in a school with 265 students as of 2013. Let's see, with the math I learned in an LAUSD of a different era, that amounts that's 12.8%...a far cry from the 90% Latino and Black population of the average LAUSD school. But it's not nice to talk about that, if you don't want to be targeted as a racist.
If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:
Lenny@perdaily.com
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