"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Bloomberg and Klein Now See No Need to Identify Minorities in NYC Schools

(Photo: AP) After building their corporate education reform agenda on years of phony numbers and lies (see also Enron, WorldCom, AIG, Goldman Sachs, etc.), the chief architect of the NYC fraud had to finally face the media cameras, at least for 20 minutes or so. So when it became clear to the world that the Manhattan Miracle was just another corporate scam and that all scores plummeted and the black-white test score gap doubled in one year as a result of reality intruding upon the Bloomberg lie, the froggy Prince croaked:
"Lots of kids don't want to go to college. They want to go off and have a career," he said. "The last time I checked, Lady Gaga was doing just fine after only one year in college."
Too bad the only career preparation that Bloomberg-Klein pretend to offer is, that's right, college.  Nothing at all in gender-bending pop star preparation, or any other.

To make the real scores less embarrassing to Bloomberg's high-salaried covey of white, thin-lipped Brits running the City's ed charade, Klein has been instructed to email his pal, Arne Duncan, to tell him that the federally-mandated policy of identifying minorities could now be "problematic and confusing:"
. . . NY1 reports that NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein sent an email to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan saying that NYC school officials don't really want to classify students by race, per federal law, "[It] may well be problematic and confusing for many of our community members, particularly Hispanics, and could create a difficult public debate about the collection of this information."
Perhaps Duncan, too,  will decide that the solution to the minority-white achievement gap is to declare universal color-blindness.  Oh, I almost forgot--Dunc has something a more "scientific"way to hide the disparity--it's called value-added growth models.

1 comment:

  1. You have got to be kidding. The school board in Wake County NC will be thrilled to hear about this. So will the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The "color-blind" ones who rewrote Brown v. Board of Ed.

    Justice Harry Blackmun- "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently."

    This has got to be a bad dream. When do we wake up?

    ReplyDelete