“There is nothing more unequal, than the equal treatment of unequal people.” – Thomas Jefferson as quoted in Alabama’s petition for relief from the No Child Left Behind Act
So the Florida Department of Education has set different goals for students of different races or classes, and some are upset in predictable ways.
In order to comply with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, the state has set a goal of, for example, increasing black students’ reading proficiency from 38% to 74% by 2017-2018. For whites, the stated goal is to improve from the current 69% proficiency rate up to 88%.
NCLB mandated from the federal level that all students had to achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The entire system was set up for failure. Educators are charged with bringing all kids up to proficiency without regard to their background or their abilities. As Frederick Hess, a staunch critic of achievement gap policies, wrote:
In essence, NCLB was an effort to link “conservative” nostrums of accountability to Great Society notions of “social justice.” The result was a noble exercise hailed for its compassion. The sad truth, however, is that the whole achievement-gap enterprise has been bad for schooling, bad for most children, and bad for the nation.
The various cheating scandals in school districts across the country – Washington D.C., Atlanta, Philadelphia, and now El Paso – are all evidence that state and local school administrators are struggling to produce acceptable test results with inferior inputs.
States failing to comply with the mandate would be hit with sanctions. To avoid such sanctions states have the option of appealing for flexibility waivers. They can be approved for such waivers and avoid having to meet these rigorous proficiency standards – as 33 states and Washington D.C. have now done – by laying out actionable plans to improve proficiency for low-performing students. These action plans involve showing the federal government their goals for the test scores of minority, disabled, and poor students.
Like Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington D.C. have set varied goals for different groups in order to comply with the mandate.
North Carolina’s proficiency targets:
Jeb Bush has carried the torch for his brother’s program. He wrote last month in the Washington Times:
This appears to be more about taking the pressure off adults than boosting the learning gains of minority children.
You don’t close an achievement gap by institutionalizing it.
Instead of merely adjusting expectations for different demographic groups, educators should set the same high standard for all children. They then should adopt a plan that emphasizes the progress being made by all low performers, regardless of demographics.
Funny, though, the entire interaction between educators and parents is about adults trying to move the pressures from themselves to some other group for the learning failures of kids throughout the country.
Jeb seems to conflate groups and individuals. This seems to be a common fallacy resulting from dogmatic allegiance to political correctness. In Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, as with all states, standards are the same for all kids. Their standard is set by the terms “Grade-level” or “proficient”. They either “pass” or they “fail”. All kids are held to that standard, but it is a mere fact that when these kids are grouped together and measured – as NCLB mandated – that they display different achievement outcomes. When a state sets a goal for a particular group, they are not tinkering with standards. Expectations and goals are not standards.
But if one must play by the rules of the prevailing system, it is a no-brainer that students of different races should have different sets of expectations. Imagine if you are a state level educator and you are charged with bringing black kids up to a certain level of proficiency. The federal government wants to know what you’ll do to improve that. You can tell the feds that you’ll bring black kids up to the same level of proficiency as white kids. You might be able to do this by lowering the proficiency rates of white kids. But that won’t look good either. So instead of just fantasizing about black kids being as proficient as a group as white kids, you paint a picture wherein black students gradually improve over time. If you set the goal up high with the white kids, you know the black kids won’t meet that goal and you end up shooting yourself in the foot because you’ve failed on the only metric the feds care about: whether or not you met the goal you said you’d meet. It doesn’t matter that you set the goal because the feds forced you to set it based upon sketchy assumptions.
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“For whites, the stated goal is to improve… proficiency rate up to 88%.”
LOL
There are two school of thought on the alt-Right: one, that liberals actually believe in equalism. Two, they privately believe in HBD but for reasons of status-posturing, they pretend to believe in equalism.
I lean toward something along the lines of version two: in their private decisions such as choosing where they live and school their children, and who they date/marry, liberals live by HBD principles. But partly due to (a) to status-posturing and handicap-principle peacocking and (b) pity for the lower-performing groups, they compartmentalize HBD and equalism wherein they profess and downright believe in equalism, except where it would infringe on their immediate interests — cf. Auster’s “unprincipled exception.”
There are some true-believer equalists, but they tend to be young and idealistic like Amy Biehl. What Moldbug calls the “amateur left” as opposed to the “professional left.”
One other category of true-believer equalists: Republicans like GWB.
pity for the lower-performing groups
They have no pity for the lower-performing groups. They are simply props on a stage and there to help them preen.
There is an element of pity. Even I have a pavlovian feeling of pity on occasions, like when I see an affirmative action type in over his head in some cringeworthy situation.
A classic example is one I described here several months ago: in the original “Batman Returns,” Batman fires his company’s arrogant white CEO and promotes Morgan Freeman’s character in his place. The movie theatre I watched this in – mostly white audience – erupted in spontaneous applause.
Part of the reason for the applause is the Politburo effect: Solzhenitsyn described scenes of Stalin’s sperches that were followed by never-ending bursts of standing ovation, lest someone be left out as politically incorrect. But the other reason for the Batman applause is that nice white people experience a cathartic release when their lingering pity for blacks (who are not often seen as CEOs) gets to be released.
Ever since earlier centuries when missionaries traveled to Africa, white man’s default reaction to the African is one of pity, as long as the latter does not act aggressively. Higher-end liberals rarely see an aggresive black. They tend to see their humble and struggling side, which is why pointing out HBD realities makes these liberals very uncomfortable.
@ PA: I like your analysis, but one asks how can anyone (well ,white or Asian) actually believe in racial egalitarianism? Seriously, it’s so preposterous.
Nobody believes in racial egalitarianism if you observe their private decisions like housing and schooling for their children. Money talks, bullshit walks, and liberals always bet on white.
Even Oprah has been criticized by blacks for having a mostly-white management and technical staff.
What looks like belief in racial egalitarianism in reality is a combination of pity, taboo enforcement, mental compartmentalization, peacocking, and slogan-repetition.
PA: OK, I get what you’re saying. But how can anyone even profess belief or trick themselves into believing? And it’s not about status-whoring because it’s through anonymous Internet commenting.
“the soft bigotry of low expectations”
Shouldn’t you be complaining about that after you have already achieved the goal?
There are a lot of black people working at the stores near me, and they seem to be able to handle the cognitive demands of the job fine. These black people are a class above ghetto blacks and probably a little smarter.
I had a liberal recently tell me, “If Jesus were alive today, he would vote Democrat.” I responded with, “Don’t you think conservatives care about the country?” He said that he believes they care more about the country, but less about the poor.
According to that liberal then, Jesus would be pleased to see angry fat black women with two fatherless children and six aborted, struggling white families ethnically cleansed from their communities and jobs through Section 8 and immigration, and white people swarm-stomped and then the press saying that they had this “random incident” coming.
you asshiles just wait intil whites are a minority
then the tables will be turned and you will be pleading for the Ruling Class of Color to let you brreathe
Anti-Racist look at white boys flapping their skinny lips saying what they want. Your response is inadequate Sir with all due Respect. Your Soldiers demand four more comments from you that are stronger.
Seems like a serious case of “if you want to say something, just come out and say it”.
I keep hearing the Lowered Expectations… , jingle in my head.
“He said that he believes they care more about the country, but less about the poor.”
There are no poor in this country.
Here’s the liberal worldview of all people being equal all the time coming up hard against reality; Either we cricify teachers on the altar of mistaken assumptions or we modify our beliefs because they’re absurd and untrue.
it’s in the hard points like this that the equalist, blank-slate creationist liberal worldview gets caught. It’s just not possible to delude yourself more when you reach that point, because the costs start to really hit home in teachers being ditched.
@PA It is “batman begins” not “batman returns”.
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