Confessions of a College Professor Doom is an illuminating website run by this college professor who laments the gross changes in how the schools are run today. I once taught at the university level and it definitely is going downhill. When I went to college way back beginning in 1967, we had fierce competition for student slots and I fought hard for my positions. Now, it is all about collecting vast government student loans and they take in anyone, any time in most places and professors who catch students slacking off or cheating are persecuted by the administrators who only want more students which equals more money. This wretched mess is also hammered by our school systems that focus on everything but the real problems with our young people who struggle to learn.
Finally, the liberal publications are noticing something isn’t working so hot: As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short – The New York Times
Last year, the legislature required all 11th graders to take a test assessing college and career readiness, as well as an exam that measured academic skills needed for most jobs.
The first results, from the ACT college admissions tests, showed that only about a quarter of students statewide were ready for either college-level math or reading. Just 6 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students scored ready for college in math, with only slightly higher rates for reading. In one poor rural district where most of the students are African-American, graduation rates have risen to more than 85 percent, yet not one student scored high enough on the ACT to be deemed ready for college in reading or math.
Even on simpler tests of the cognitive skills needed for many jobs, fewer than two-thirds of South Carolina 11th graders could show sufficient skills in both math and reading.
I would bet the 6% black students who did well went to mostly white/Asian schools. The complete chaos that has engulfed inner city black schools has been studiously ignored by everyone including especially black leaders who focus mainly on preventing police patrols from operating in these same cities with a near-universal ‘low learning rate’ levels. Back when I used to work on crime/community relations in NYC, we joked that many kids did the school to street to the pen life course. Their goal, if a male black youth, is to retire in prison if they live past 30 years which is increasingly unlikely.
The death rate is ferocious. Not just by shooting at each other but dying from drugs and drinking, suicide, and of course, disease, this is a real problem which needs real focus and so all the great leaders from our black President on down is focused on the relatively minor problem of the statistically rare case of cops messing up and killing a black male. 776 People Killed By Police So Far in 2015, 161 Of Them Unarmed versus over 8,000 blacks killing blacks per year. Considering the rolling battles between the criminal class and the police, a 10% or less kill rate is fairly small since both sides are armed and use guns. FBI reports 27 cops were killed last year. In New York, Number of cops killed by guns up 56% in 2014.
The real problem is, black youths are failing schooling attempts and are opting for a life of crime and are thus, tangling with cops in a destructive way more and more and are killing each other over crime territory issues more and more. They have been shoved out of the labor market by illegal aliens and are opting to be criminals instead because it makes money.
Back to the article about the failure of the public schools: Most readers of the NYT agrees with this comment from a reader:
Juris Marlton NJ 15 hours ago
Nobody really cares! America for the last forty years has been importing its doctors, engineers, scientists from overseas mainly India, Pakistan, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, etc.. They come here to graduate school and stay forever because they are guaranteed a very good life. Our Congress and Wall Street doesn’t need a good US public school system because of “globalization” of intellectual talent which provides America’s brain power. It’s so obvious to anyone who has worked in a technical field all his/her life. Our schools, except those in very affluent neighborhoods, are a wasteland and they will stay that way since the Fortune 500 corporations can do without them.
I remember when young males were taught how to build things and I had to sue for the right to take these same classes 55 years ago. It was a wasted effort since schools decided to not teach these vital skills for a while. From 1986: High School Shop Classes Soon May Be Thing of Past – latimes but now they are returning, sort of…The Return of Vocational High Schools – US News & World Report this year.
Here is an article today complaining about what is wrong with the schools. I remember when California had a very high level school system. Now it lies in ruins. LA Times – Achievement gaps widen for California’s black and Latino students
The new tests are based on state learning goals for each grade, called the Common Core; they have been adopted by 42 states. For the first time, the exams were given on computers. Questions become more difficult depending on students’ answers. Scoring is designed to be in line with what students would need to be successful in a four-year college, a higher standard than in the past.
The results of the new tests should sound an alarm, if one was needed, said Bill Lucia, of the Sacramento-based advocacy group EdVoice. “There’s a problem and it’s not, per se, the test,” Lucia said. “There is something going on here when you talk about the difference in the size of the gap, particularly in math.”
In that subject, 69% of Asian students achieved the state targets compared to 49% of whites, 21% of Latinos and 16% of blacks.
Although even Asian students have room to improve, their relative performance stood out. In math, the percentage of Asians who met state targets declined 12%. White students went down 21%, Latinos 50%, black students 54%. More than half the students who took the test were Latino.
So, roughly 60%+ students saw their test scores fall by over 50%? Wow. This is definitely a race issue as well as an illegal alien issue since many Hispanics first came illegally into the US over the last 40 years. The total collapse with black students, any one of whom, if they manage to successfully graduate, will be showered with offers and scholarships due to skin color, is amazing to see. Even bright, potentially hard working black children know they don’t have to lift a finger to succeed if they wish to do this and this destroys their work ethic, big time.
I saw this up close when living in New York City and elsewhere. Since Asian students are classified as ‘white’ they know they have to work very, very hard to succeed and they do this because of their families. I have known many such and my son in law is Chinese and the parents all, even if they speak no English, hammer away at their children constantly and watch over them closely even if this means parking them in the back of businesses and stores with grandpa watching over them, studying hard. It is a strong family thing.
Instead of studying why Asian immigrants are so successful in mastering school and outstrip all other groups, we have endless studies and ‘school reforms’ aimed at getting aimless, cynical, bored minority children to go to school and learn when they fiercely resist this and frankly, there is nearly no reason to work hard since, if they can coast through, they are showered with rewards? Instead, more rewards are showered on the increasingly fewer and fewer black children who manage to somehow overcome all this and complete schooling.
Here is a story that dares ask verboten questions: Where Are All the White People in San Francisco Public Schools?
Recently, our friends at San Francisco Public Press connected us with a really interesting data set: the demographics of San Francisco public schools. There were a lot of eye-opening statistics in the there. For example, in 2014, 58% of the students at public schools qualified for free or reduced-priced lunch based on their families income level — a shockingly high number of a city going through an economic boom.
Another thing stood out to us: There aren’t very many white students in the public school system, even though a lot of white people live in San Francisco. We decided to dig a little bit deeper into the data to figure this out. Where are the white people in San Francisco public schools?
In San Francisco, 41.6% of the overall population is white, according to the Census estimate for 2013. Of the city’s population age 19 and under, 28.7% are white. So you might expect, like we did, that white students would make up about 28-30% of the public school system.
In the 2013-2014 school year, only 12.9% of San Francisco public school students were white.
In NYC, we all, who had any money, black or white or Asian, removed our children to go ‘private school’ by at least 6th grade to save our children from destruction. But high school? That is a wonderful time for parents in NYC if they were very careful to not expose their children to public schools in the lower grades. This is when one competes to go to the many specialized high schools that are most excellent! Junior High is when the most children are pulled from public schools.
Obama Slams Parents Who Send Kids to Private School, But Scarborough Has Perfect Question About That except Obama won’t answer it, of course. Just like ‘climate change’. It is the #1 issue according to Obama, we are all going to die, he claims, this is a terrible thing…and then he merrily flies all over kingdom come in his private jet, travels in giant armored gas guzzling vehicles and heats and air conditions his giant mansion. At our expense, too! A win/win for him and he is destroying the planet earth! Put him in chains and have him lay rail road tracks!
Anyways, he is the same about black schools. DC has nothing but black public schools. Study: DC Schools Are LITERALLY The Worst In The Nation and Obama’s daughters wouldn’t touch these with a ten foot pole. Obama didn’t fix a single black school in DC in nearly 8 years. D.C. Schools Post the Lowest High School Graduation Rate In The Nation and not a peep from Obama who claimed he wanted to save black children from bad schools. Money has been poured into the DC school system and it still stinks and we all know if suddenly thousands and thousands of Asians moved there, the schools would be the best in the nation. This fact infuriates liberals who believe that outside forces are at work and if only money and good will were poured on populations, they would reform.
Black reforms must come from within! But present leaders are not leading this. Obama is obvious here, he loves to lecture people but won’t speak a single truthful word to his own people. WATCH: Black Chicago residents try to GUESS the rate of Black children born out of wedlock » The Right Scoop –
Preliminary data indicate that 40.7 percent of all 2012 births were out-of-wedlock, which is appalling, and there are vast differences among racial and ethnic groups. Among non-Hispanic blacks, the figure is highest, at 72.2 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, it’s 66.9 percent; 53.5 percent for Hispanics; 29.4 percent for non-Hispanic whites; and a mere 17.1 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders.
The birth/marriage numbers echo the education facts. The higher the single mom rate, the lower the school success rate. Two steady parents are better than one and all the Asian kids I have known since my youth lived also with at least one grandparent, too. A secure family=school success! What a shocking thing this is! Yet all the talk at the top about reforming schools to save the black children from destruction never mentions this.
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But the answer to this problem is so simple. The expectations inherent in current college levels of reading and math are way to high, racist to not put to fine a point on it, and must be reduced to meet the capabilities of the current and future crops of taxpayer babysat high school seniors.
I am so looking forward to the legacy Asian admittance policies that will dominate the future of the American institutions of diminished learning.
Oh who will support the football programs? Who will pay for the new stadia?
Maybe the intercollegiate badminton tournaments will become popular?
What we have here, is the dynamic described in Idiocracy, where the director carefully sidestepped the racial aspect, and presented the lower class people as white hillbillies. Regardless, the dynamic is the same there as it is in Beak of the Finch.
It’s simple Darwinian evolution working: when times are easy and living is cheap, evolution favors fecundity. When times are tough, fecundity is not so important, and selection tends to favor calculation, cleverness and treachery.
They key indicator is in how many of your grandchildren survive to make great-grandchildren for you. 😉
There is an intelligence quota to be considered as well. It’s not all cultural, although clearly a change in culture would benefit not only the black community but the white as well. The Bell Curve has been widely ignored, despite overwhelming evidence that IQ is genetic. In other words, it’s entirely possible to expect the negro population to need huge infusions of cash for the future, as it is clearly evident they cannot support themselves without massive amounts of welfare assistance.
Thanks, E Sutton. College is vastly over rated.
And at 40k a year or more, vastly over priced.
However for some it is a way to big money [MD, Lawyer, Corporate job, Gov job for blacks via Affirmative action].
Instead of studying why Asian immigrants are so successful in mastering school and outstrip all other groups, [could that be IQ and nepotism?]
WHY HAVE IMMIGRANTS?
USA has doubled its population since LBJ signed the 1965 Act. And despite what some refuse to believe, the jews are behind it, in all once White countries they force immigration and ‘diversity.’
Our country was sold out, blame Javits and Celler.
Elaine, you have written about ‘De Vry’ being a ‘worthless diploma mill.’
Did you know one of the ‘mills’ will give a GI an AA degree for their GI Bill money? All the person has to do is take ONE online class. They give 60+ credits for ‘life experience.’
re,Now, it is all about collecting vast government student loans and they take in anyone, any time in most places—also School keeps people out of the overcrowded workplace.
thats another reason it exists.
* Back during segregation, were there street gangs infiltrating into the high and even grade schools?
* Back during segregation, did gangs use media to publicize their drugs and guns?
*Back during segregation, did gangbangers terrorize entire neighborhoods with shootings?
* Back during segregation, did police need tactical gear to keep crime under control?
The DA informs us that today, after law enforcement cracks down, Selma will become a “quiet place.” But wasn’t it quiet before all those “civil rights” agitators marched into the town way back when?
One might ask, “What has happened over the last several decades such that Selma is now a third world war zone?” [SBPDL blog].
Of course a corollary to that evolution model, the selective process being different in easy times than tough times, is the dynamic of royal families.
Elaine has mentioned this, and historical examples are found in every royal family, ever. They go from some high-achieving genius, usually after some military accomplishments, founds an aristocracy/royalty. And then that family ends up inbred, infirm, weak, and stupid. Happens every time.
One of the things that made the British Empire so powerful was that the island kingdom had been washed over by wave after wave of conquest from northern Europe. The British royals have actually had some selective pressure applied, and weren’t allowed to stagnate like the ancient Egyptians.
It was one of the things the founding fathers of the USA tried to forestall. No more royalty, right? But we have, for example, the Bush family — from Vannevar and Prescott in the 20th century, to the current crop of village-idiot Bushes.
At lower levels, of course, we have the humans living in ‘bad neighborhoods’. So long as they have that safety net, there is no selective pressure to improve the gene pool …
Interesting discussion. Let me add my two cents.
Let’s step back and look at the big picture. Our grandparents’ generation uniformly believed that African Americans and native Americans were intellectually inferior, as a general rule. There were exceptions to the rule, but these were rare. This commonly held belief resulted in an ingrained, institutionalized discrimination.
In order to combat this form of discrimination the liberals have promoted a world view in which all ethnics groups are equal in everything. Blacks are merely chocolate white people in their view. Obvious differences between groups of people are treated as 100% attributable to environment by liberals, since this MUST be the case because all people by nature are born equal in everything.
In order to perpetuate this world view all facts which might undermine it at viciously attacked. Anyone questioning this view are called “racists” or worse. This is of course is the end of the discussion, since no one wants to be labeled a racists. So we are all stuck with the liberal world view, in spite of overwhelming evidence that our grandparents’ generation had a pretty good handle on things.
With no one able to question the validity of the liberals’ world view, we are all on a slippery slope. If the minorities cannot be raised up, then everyone else must be brought down to their level. The “dumbing down” of the school systems to accommodate this approach is well under way. As a result, only the already-well-off can secure a good education for their children by taking them out of the public schools.
This undermines the whole purpose of the public school system. Everyone will no longer be receiving a good education, with the resulting good economic opportunities. And the country will degenerate into a stratified society, similar to old Europe.
Once again, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
@ # 9
What’s your point?
The elites don’t want ANY children except their own to benefit from education. Mass school systems they hated as they were part and parcel of the equalization between the classes. Even worse they allowed social mobility. Hence all those very, very English and American turn of the 19th century novels about the aristocracy stooping to marry “tradesman” or a person outside the religion (mainly Jewish).
It won’t be long before we are living in Jude the Obscure’s world again. As we bow and curtsey to the rich and educated.
In regards to Minority students and failing schools, the impetus now is to make teachers take on parental responsibilities for the “students”. When I temped for an “Education Reform” Non-Profit their focus was to create school lessons catering to the “students” not what was required to be an educated and productive human being. They messed with goals and testing so that it was all geared to the least able student to pass. The onus of blame for failing students was placed solely on teachers.
Many of the people working at this company were black. All of them had higher education and big degrees. Yes, they were intelligent. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t addressing the real problems. But then I began to suspect that they were proverbially kicking the ladders they used to rise above. They wouldn’t be so special if ALL minorities were given help to change bad cultural habits and excel in school.
I seem to recall a stat that the suicide rate among Asian pupils in the San Franscisco area is disproportionally large. The Tiger mom’s squeeze the life out of their little darlings trying to hammer them into star pupils at all costs.
OT: Seems the US Special Forces are busy saving their ISIS/Al Qaida assets in Syria and Iraq before they get killed by the SAA+allies and Iraqi forces.
Compare these articles:
—
“One of ISIS’ top commanders was a ‘star pupil’ [Al-Shishani] of US-special forces training in the country of Georgia”
http://www.businessinsider.sg/omar-al-shishani-isis-commander-and-us-2015-9/#.VoCiGI3KxoA
—
Love Thy Enemy? US Plot to Evacuate Top Jihadis From Ramadi Uncovered
http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20151227/1032365363/iraq-us-daesh-ramadi.html
—
Now there is a rumour that Al Shishani has been captured by US Special Forces in Kirkuk.
Is the point that “ingrained, institutionalized discrimination” constitutes a “pretty good handle on things” ?
@#15,
Um, no, I think the point is that when we lower the bar for success, society over all suffers and declines. It’s perfectly understandable that some races are dramatically underachievers and of significantly lower intelligence. Demanding that everyone is the “same” and capable of being rocket scientists or brain surgeons (Ben Carlson) is disingenuous at best and disastrous at worst. We’ve been at this “everyone is the same” game for over 50 years now. The consequences couldn’t possibly be clearer. There will always be a market for people who know how to empty trash and scrub toilets. Collecting generational welfare? Not so much……..
The real point is, teaching kids to goof off because they will get a reward anyways ends up destroying the children treated this way!
It is all so very sad. This is why upper class kids do poorly, too. Everything is handed on a silver platter. At the top and bottom of society there is this collapse in intelligence which is mainly due to children giving up learning anything when young.
The poor at the bottom go to prison or get killed one way or another or go on welfare, too. And at the very top, they are wrapped in cotton and escorted through a useless life that is nearly a living death.
It is interesting watching Prince Harry struggle with all this, he runs all over the planet embracing the poor and sick, trying to find meaning in his own life.
==> I would bet the 6% black students who did well went to mostly white/Asian schools.
That probably is quite a wrong guess… There is a lot of evidence that the first determinant of a person’s success at school is parents, not how good the school is, or how much money is spent on education, or the race of the students or the skills of the teacher. And here “parents” means mothers, as this other comment shows:
==> I seem to recall a stat that the suicide rate among Asian pupils in the San Franscisco area is disproportionally large. The Tiger mom’s squeeze the life out of their little darlings trying to hammer them into star pupils at all costs.
As to the importance of parents,I can’t remember the source, but some studies showed that:
– Black children raised by white parents (that is, mothers) had the same school performance as white children (think of one guy called Barrie).
– White children raised by black parent (that is, mothers) tended to have a rather lower school performance than other white children.
– Even more tellingly, when black children being raised by white parents end up with black parents, their school performance soon falls to near that of other black children.
The crucial determinant is whether mothers see their children as pension assets (or at least status symbols, but usually far less importantly) or not.
Perhaps yellow children are slightly “superior” on average under some metric to pink children who perhaps are slightly “superior” on average to dark children, but the variation seems quite small if it exists, and the influence of the mothers is overwhelming.
When the culture of the mothers is that they want highly profitable pension assets they become “tiger moms” and like typical italian/chinese/jewish/japanese culture mothers they put enormous pressure on their sons (far less on their daughters) to be highly competitive for the best paying jobs at any cost (to those childrens, and often of the mothers themselves).
It is pretty obvious that black mothers don’t do that, and I have seen some explanations for that, among them:
– Black mothers would actually like to “tiger mom” their children into valuable pension assets, but they have found that even if they invest a lot of effort in that, their children will be discriminated against as to getting into the best jobs (lawyer, doctor, … those targeted by chinese/jewish/italian/japanese mothers) and thus that investment will be largely wasted.
– Because of the previous point or because of long term cultural issues, black mothers target their children at reproductive success rather than financial success, and in particular at their sons becoming the best pump-and-dump players in the hood.
Which probably relates to the other comment:
==> They key indicator is in how many of your grandchildren survive to make great-grandchildren for you
Anytime you have “ingrained, institutionalized discrimination” the victims will eventually fight back.
At least “liberals” have good intentions. “Conservatives” are apparently OK with any status quo, no matter how diabolical, as long as they personally are doing alright.
Some of the comments here defies logic or common sense. An “ingrained, institutionalized discrimination ” somehow becomes a supporting argument for how black and native peoples are inferior. I guess the” superior race” is after all a figment of one’s imagination. You can denigrate other people or cultures all you want but it is just a reflection of your own inadequacies. The program of the mass indoctrination has been successful. BTW, we are all “consumers” but please choose what you consume very carefully.
In all fairness, the liberal policies have failed. All of the conservative whiners are actually right about that. But in truth, contrary to the wildly popular conservative propaganda, liberalism itself is not the problem. The problem is, as always, human selfishness, greed, and perhaps a dose of hubris combined with an exaggerated sense of self-importance in general.
For example, when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, ‘Merica basically said, “Them sumbiches make more than me so screw ’em”.
How do you like it so far?
«the liberal policies have failed»
Some liberal policies have failed because there are a lot of idiot wishful thinkers among liberals, especially the version 2 liberals that only care about culture wars, or about making Wall Street rich.
But broadly liberal, as in centrist/christian-democrat policies have lifted dozens of millions of people in the USA from dire poverty to mere poverty, and provided a bit of stabilization to the economy.
Sure, there are still some very poor people (almost all men) who die of cold or sickness in the streets and whose corpses are carted off and dumped into pits (look for the photos on the web), but a lot fewer than in the past (and this happens mostly in “we love freedom” red states).
A lot of people today don’t remember what poverty used to be like and how common it was, and are happy for the USA to become once again more like Mexico or Brazil.
«when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers»
That happened in a period of all-too-common strikes, and the air-traffic controllers went over the top. Like the miners who followed A Scargill in the UK.
Most voters decided that the labor unions had gone too far, even if they benefit from them. Also a lot of irish/jewish/italian origin working-class voters had just become middle-class thanks to those unions, and they did not mind kicking off the ladder.
pauper/indigent burials:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2088709/Third-world-America-Pics-paupers-grave-Chicago.html
http://www.theweek.co.uk/pictures/44496/pictures-pauper-burials-rise-us-economy-fails
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/news/story/2011/nov/27/sullivan-ends-pauper-burial-service/64873/
“Instead of studying why Asian immigrants are so successful in mastering school and outstrip all other groups…” There are LOTS of uneducated Asians, but that’s definitely NOT what you see in the US. The Asian college students you see in the USA are not “random” students; in general, they are the cream of the Asian student “crop”. Oh yeah, you will get a share of Asian rich kids who get here in the USA because Daddy has Big Bucks and it is Party Time! for junior, but mostly Asian kids are here in the USA due to merit. And the thing to ALWAYS remember when the topic of Asian skill sets–whether it is in the academic world or the business world or wherever–is the odds are in a country like China’s favor. With a population of 1.7 BILLION people, the odds are REAL good that there will be a handful of prodigy pianists, violinists, top science students, top math students, etc. This is not to say that individual motivation is not a factor; it is, but opportunity is important as well. I would say that one of the biggest if not THE biggest factors in a nation’s–China, for example–success is the element of merit-based COMPETITION. This is in sharp contrast to what goes on in the US. People are hired many times based on who they know, not what they know. Students are passed along in school, often based on little more than physical attendance. And of course, the elites want American children as dumbed down as possible; easier to manipulate that way.
Probably no one will read this comment, since this link is now pretty old. However, I feel compelled to clarify my earlier comment. When I wrote it I was rushed and didn’t get the chance to fully articulate my thoughts.
Both the older generation’s institutionalized discrimination and the current everyone-is-equal-in-all-things approaches are wrong. The truth is in the middle. There are arguments supporting both extremes, and so that tends to cloud the issue, but in the end the only fair approach is to base decisions simply on merit. For this reason I am opposed to affirmative action, as well as other preferences such as family name and connections.
As for “Name’s” comment that at least the failed liberal policies were compassionate and not mean spirited like conservatives, I refer you to the book Who Really Cares. Studies were done to see if liberals or conservatives were more likely to offer help to someone in need whom they personally encountered. The conservatives won hands down. When it came to their own time and money, the run of the mill conservative, church going, heartland Americans were much nicer to strangers in need than self professed liberals.