By Jeff Davis. The challenging task of trying to educate inner city blacks is not just an obsession for liberals, it’s an industry with billions of dollars at stake.
The Huffington Post reports: “Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students’ test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling [black] students were seated next to higher-performing [White] classmates so they could copy answers. Those and other confessions are contained in a new state report that reveals how far some Atlanta public schools went to raise test scores in the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half the city’s schools allowed the cheating to go unchecked for as long as a decade, beginning in 2001.”
Huffington goes on: “Administrators – pressured to maintain high scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law – punished or fired those who reported anything amiss and created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation, according to the report released earlier this month, two years after officials noticed a suspicious spike in some scores. The report names 178 teachers and principals, and 82 of those confessed. Tens of thousands of [black] children at the 44 schools, most in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, were allowed to advance to higher grades, even though they didn’t know basic concepts.”
“For teachers and their bosses, the stakes were high: Schools that perform poorly and fail to meet certain benchmarks under the federal law can face sharp sanctions. They may be forced to offer extra tutoring, allow parents to transfer children to better schools, or fire teachers and administrators who don’t pass muster.”
“No Child Left Behind” was an attempt on the part of conservatives to compel teachers to teach something and make the public education system something besides a black hole that consumed endless billions of dollars with little to show for it in the inner cities. Obviously it was doomed to fail just as current attempts under Obama to educate negroes are failing. No one can. The best teachers in the world can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, not even with billions of dollars at stake. So you see the problem.
The Huffington article continues “In Georgia, teachers complained to investigators that some students arrived at middle school reading at a first-grade level. But, they said, principals insisted those students had to pass their standardized tests. Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice, authorities said.”
“One principal forced a teacher to crawl under a desk during a faculty meeting because her test scores were low. Another principal told teachers that ‘Walmart is hiring’ and ‘the door swings both ways,’ the report said.”
“Another principal told a teacher on her first day that the school did whatever was necessary to meet testing benchmarks, even if that meant ‘breaking the rules.’ ”
You see the way this article is subtly slanted, of course? In the first place, the entire issue of race is never mentioned at all, even though the entire country knows who lives in Atlanta and who staffs the Atlanta public school system. In the second place, the blame is subtly shifted to some outside party—in this case mean old principals and beyond them mean old Republicans. The mostly black and female teachers are subtly relieved of blame for lying and stealing from the government.
Now, what they’re angling for—and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this come out of this “scandal”—is for the states to drop all testing, period, so that blacks do not consistently score lower than Whites and “feel bad about themselves.”
The truth is that blacks have scored 15 percent below White people on intelligence tests for over 100 years. If the government and the media simply admitted the truth, then all these teachers would not be blamed for failing an impossible task (to make the scores for blacks equal to Whites) and black students would not be blamed for their lesser performance in school.
