Getting Dumber Everyday and Proud of It
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/failure-city-public-schools-lost-generation-jonathan-turley
3/6/2021
Some of my parents’ worse fears have come true for our public schools. Indeed, many school officials seem intent on replicating past failures while opposing the testing that exposes those failures.
Some have denounced "meritocracy" as racist while others, including New York congressman, have recently attacked standardized tests as racist.
At the same time, officials are driving top-performing students from their systems in Boston, New York and other cities where advanced programs are being shut down or suspended.
The problem with objective and standardized testing is precisely that it is objective and standardized on performance.
The top spending public school districts are also some of the worst-performing school districts. New York topped the per capita spending at $24,040 per kid. Washington, D.C. is close at $22,759. Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts.
According to a 2019 study, over half of the New York City public school kids cannot handle basic math or English.
On tests, Asian kids show a 74.4 percent proficiency in math with a 66.6 proficiency for whites, a 33.2 percent proficiency for Hispanics, and a
28.2 percent proficiency for African Americans.
Thus,
more than two-thirds of African American kids were not able to handle basic math in a school system with one of the highest per capita expenditures for students in the country.
In Washington, with the highest per capita spending on students, education officials "celebrated" a small improvement of scores in 2019. However, the scores would make most people cringe.
Only 21.1 percent of Black students were proficient in math (as opposed to 78.8 percent for white students).
As for the racial disparities in test performances, I hate to say it, but at least some of that's a cultural difference. It's been more than a decade since my stint in the urban school, but when I was there it was all-too-common among African-American students for being smart to be looked at as bad. I even knew kids who deliberately kept themselves from getting better than D grades because they didn't want to be called "oreos" (i.e., black on the outside, white in the middle). Didn't see that attitude with white and Asian students. My current school has a significant African immigrant population, and I don't see that attitude from the born-in-Africa families, either.