Sunday, July 29, 2012

Obama’s Executive Order to Make Inner City Schools Great

By Gary North


President Obama has signed an executive order. He has set up a new bureaucracy. This bureaucracy plans to make inner-city education so good that whites will move back.

You remain skeptical? O, ye of little faith!

This executive order has this goal: to give black children top-flight public education, which means non-flight education. Blacks who have been able to get out of inner-city school districts have been fleeing for several decades. This is what the President is trying to stop.

There is a problem with his plan: public education. It has been declining visibly for approximately 100 years, give or take a decade. The decline has sped up over the last 50 years.


For blacks, the decline has been a disaster. The inner-city schools have been deliberately dumbed down as policy. Thomas Sowell has written on several occasions about the all-black high school in Washington, D.C.: Dunbar High School. From 1870 to 1955, it provided education as good as any white district’s program. (It was surely better than mine, 1955-59.) It taught Latin. It taught advanced courses in science. Its students went to college. Ralph Bunche was one of its graduates. It was deliberately dumbed down half a century ago as a matter of district policy.

President Obama intends to smarten up the inner-city schools. How will he do this? With a new bureaucracy.

His executive order is a litany on the failure of tax-funded education in America. It’s hard to fault him on this. The problem is this: the federal government has been laying down the law to school districts for 40 years. The schools have gotten worse. Dr. Charles Sykes’ book has it right: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves, But Can’t Read, Write, or Add.

Candidate Ronald Reagan vowed to shut down the Department of Education. Its budget went up ever year he was in office.

Read the rest here.

6 comments:

  1. Speaking as a special ed high school teacher for CPS here in Chi town...all I can say is, as long it is written down on paper it is done!

    http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19801224&id=SCAqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=xysEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7029,2337427

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  2. The saddest part of this is that Obama and company probably believe that some positive effect will result from all of this. Ignorance, however bliss, is costly for the rest of us.

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  3. Federal programs mean local districts take federal dough. Taking federal dollars means turning teachers into federal patsies. Civic responsibility then gets colored with contempt. The states will rhetorically support the feds to keep money flowing--got cities to bail out you know. Everybody will be paid off. Imagine being a kid in that environment. Bullying will go unabated against a backdrop of UN-inspired, anti-bullying rhetoric and curriculum and multi-culturalism. Signs with phrases like "No-Hate Zone" or "Hate-Free Zone" or "Making Threats Is No Joke" and "If You See A Weapon, Tell Someone." America, the bastion of freedom! I feel sorry for any soul that decides to take on such tasks and sorry for any student who is compelled to sit and learn in such a controlling environment. You won't find leadership in schools, only control. Too cynical? I hope so.

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  4. Maybe it's my public school education, but my eyes glazed over when I tried to read the text of the executive order. I think need some advice on best practices from my federal network.

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  5. I think that President Obama is sincere with his efforts to help America's public schools, but mis-informed as to the real problems of Black non- mainstream inner-city students..Unless the Obama administration and the administrations to follow can break the grip of the cumulative deficit on Black non-mainstream students, they cannot claim success for their school reform efforts..There are no short-term, get tough accountability solutions for non-mainstream students..Unfortunately, the problem is more complex..While Bush is to be applauded for attempting to document the academic problems of America's public school system, he has, in many ways, unknowingly opened a "Pandora's Box.." If educational reform efforts are to be successful, they must benefit from the mistakes of the past..They must be aware of how the government's previous efforts at educational reform failed to help Black non-mainstream students close the achievement gap..It is one thing to document the scope of the problem and quite another to intervene with any degree of success..Society is begining to discover that, far from realizing the well intended goal of President Bush's"no child will be left behind" hundreds of thousands of children in the past and present continue to be left behind..The public schools, at this time, have no conceptual or theoretical framework for addressing the "cumulative deficit.." The longer Black non-mainstream students remain in school, the farther behind they become in their achievement as compared with their White peers..Without a framework for addressing this problem, the schools will continue to do what they have done in the past with the same poor results..President Obama and America's public schools are in need of help, the kind of help that only social science-based research can provide.."The Unfinished Business of the Civil Rights Movement:Failure of America's Public Schools to Properly Educate its African American Student Populations.."

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  6. I think that President Obama is sincere with his efforts to help unemployment and America's public schoolz...

    Unless... UNTIL(!$!} 0Bama bucks his "White Masters" (AKA the CIA that has deep ties To him & MOM, DAD, STEPDAD, and MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS) then his pretension that he is just a good kid recruited by the CIA will never die.

    The US can be broken into a half dozen "Parties", all "free-love" stop killing innocent people tangentially" tied with the Demoncrats, while Bush2 is just a pawn.

    fuck all of them.

    Our government is an example of "absolute power" (R's and D's are bot creepy, evil psychos) and they need to be stopped.

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