Resegregating College – Trump/Session Try to Stem the Flow of Minority Graduates

The major driver for Chumph voters was racism. The issue being that non-white folks have been kicking their asses at the Graduate level in the STEM fields.

Unable to slow down the $12 billion a year immigrants pour into our college systems each year. the Chumph and his racist dog Sessions have decided to attack black folks.

After all, any black student at a University is taking a seat away from an under qualified white person.

Why Putin’s Bitch (and his racist lap dogs) has to go…Soon.

Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions

The POS and his racist lapdog

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses.

Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial.

“The civil rights laws were deliberately written to protect everyone from discrimination, and it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well,” he said.

But Kristen Clarke, the president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do.

“This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

The Justice Department declined to provide more details about its plans or to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.

“The Department of Justice does not discuss personnel matters, so we’ll decline comment,” said Devin O’Malley, a department spokesman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor among many in a “holistic” evaluation, while rejecting blunt racial quotas or race-based point systems. But what that permits in actual practice by universities — public ones as well as private ones that receive federal funding — is often murky.

Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.

He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn.

Some of that data, he added, could be available through the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which did not respond to a request for comment.

 

HBCUs and Trump

Interesting interview. Not sure where, other than Leli Baskerville, Roland dug his panel up from. The woman on the right hand side of the table, who isn’t identified is a world class Auntie Tommette, lying about what President Obama did for HBCUs.

The facts…

Under the Obama Administration, 1 million more African-American and Latino students have enrolled in college. What’s more, black and Hispanic students earned more than 270,000 more undergraduate degrees in 2013-2014 than in 2008-2009. This Administration remains focused on continuing to increase the number of students who successfully complete college. To that end, the Department has worked to make new opportunities available to HBCUs.

Federal funding to HBCUs has grown each year since 2009. Through the Higher Education Act, HBCUs received a $17 million funding increase this year—the largest increase for the federal Strengthening HBCUs program in six years. And President Obama’s FY 2017 budget seeks to maintain and strengthen these opportunities for HBCUs to build their capacity. The FY 2017 budget proposes $85 million in mandatory funding to HBCUs, an increase of $5 million from FY 2016, plus an additional $244.7 million in discretionary funds for Title III.

The Administration has also fought for and won a historic commitment to fully fund Pell Grants and expand student aid for millions of low-income students. Pell Grant funding for HBCU students increased significantly between 2007 and 2014, growing from $523 million to $824 million. This year, President Obama announced a plan to make sure that Pell Grants are fully funded, including inflationary adjustments, and used strategically by students to reduce time and cost for receiving a terminal degree. The President’s 2017 budget also proposes a $30 million HBCU and Minority Serving Institution Innovation for Completion Fund, to help students from low-income backgrounds overcome challenges and persist through graduation day.

The other facts –

The brutal truth is, at least the bottom half of these schools either need to be shut down or no longer receive federal support and funding. I would cut everything except the top 10 or 20. Close the doors on the rest, absorb them into their respective State Junior College System…Or install a granite marker where they used to be. Investing money in the top 20 schools would likely make a difference – especially in not throwing away money at the bottom 30. Spellman, Howard, Hampton, Morehouse, and Fisk have the capability to become competitive with the very best schools in America.

Time to cut bait or fish.

 

300 Documented Hate Crimes Since Chumph “Election”

The Chump Storm Troopers are on a tear…

Over 60% of Hate Crimes go unreported – so the number could well be in the thousands.

SPLC: At Least 300 Hate Crimes Reported Since Election

More than 300 hate crimes have been reported since the presidential election last week, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most cases of harassment and intimidation occurred in schools and on university campuses, with many cases involving direct references to Donald Trump, the watchdog group told NBC News on Monday. The SPLC published its report on post-election incidents last Friday, but since that time, it said complaints have continued to come in. Among the incidents it documented and those verified by NBC News, many were targeted against Muslims and blacks. Over the weekend, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan told police a white male had demanded she take off her hijab or he would “set her on fire with a lighter,” according to the SPLC report. Elsewhere, a high school in Jacksonville, Florida, saw “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs placed above drinking fountains. And this past weekend, a church in Maryland offering a Spanish-language service was vandalized with a sign reading, “Trump nation, whites only.” Similar incidents have been reported in cities throughout the nation, the report warns. The watchdog said it would continue to monitor such incidents using social media, news reports, and direct submissions to the SPLC website.

 

High School Graduation Rates in US at Record High

More kids are graduating High School in 4 years than ever before.

Nation’s high school graduation rate reaches new record high

The nation’s high school graduation rose again in the 2014-2015 school year, reaching a new record high as more than 83 percent of students earned a diploma on time, according to federal data released Monday.

The figures show gains among every group of students — including white, black, Asian, Hispanic and Native American, as well as low-income students, students with disabilities and those learning English as a second language. The broad improvement continues a trend that began with the 2010-2011 school year, when states first adopted a uniform method of reporting graduation rates.

Gaps between student groups continued to close but remained large: Nearly 88 percent of white students graduated on time, 10 percentage points higher than Hispanic students (78 percent), 13 percentage points higher than black students (75 percent), and 16 percentage points above Native American and Native Alaskan students (72 percent).

 

 

What Happens When The Last Black Teacher Leaves?

Have had a few discussions over the years about the impact of integrating schools.

The US School System has been in freefall for a number of years – indeed since Raygun. How an entire political class dedicated t hatred of the Public School system and dedicated to destroying Teachers Union could do anything but fail is beyond me. We are about 17th or 18th in the world now behind almost every one of the “socialist” developed nations.

In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers fell 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, it dropped 40 percent.

BLACK TEACHERS MATTER

America’s schools desperately need educators like Darlene Lomax. So why are we driving them away?

One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father’s house in northwest Philadelphia. She took a right onto Germantown Avenue, one of the city’s oldest streets, and pulled up to Germantown High School, a stately brick-and-stone building. Empty whiskey bottles and candy cartons were piled around the benches in the school’s front yard. Posters of the mascot, a green and white bear, had browned and curled. In what was once the teachers’ parking lot, spindly weeds shot up through the concrete. Across the street, above the front door of the also-shuttered Robert Fulton Elementary School, a banner read, “Welcome, President Barack Obama, October 10, 2010.”

It had been almost three years since the Philadelphia school district closed Germantown High, and 35 years since Lomax was a student there. But the sight of the dead building, stretching over an entire city block, still pained her. She looked at her old classroom windows, tinted in greasy brown dust, and thought about Dr. Grabert, the philosophy teacher who pushed her to think critically and consider becoming the first in her family to go to college. She thought of Ms. Stoeckle, the English teacher, whose red-pen corrections and encouraging comments convinced her to enroll in a program for gifted students. Lomax remembers the predominantly black school—she had only one white and one Asian American classmate—as a rigorous place, with college preparatory honors courses and arts and sports programs. Ten years after taking Ms. Stoeckle’s class, Lomax had dropped by Germantown High to tell her that she was planning to become a teacher herself.

A historic Georgian Revival building, Germantown High opened its doors in 1915 as a vocational training ground for the industrial era, with the children of blue-collar European immigrants populating its classrooms. In the late 1950s, the district added a wing to provide capacity for the growing population of a rapidly integrating neighborhood.

By 1972, Lomax’s father, a factory worker, had saved up enough to move his family of eight from a two-bedroom apartment in one of the poorest parts of Philadelphia into a four-bedroom brick house in Germantown. Each month, Darlene and her younger sister would walk 15 blocks to the mortgage company’s gray stucco building, climb up to the second floor, and press a big envelope with money orders into the receptionist’s hand. The new house had a dining room and a living room, sparkling glass doorknobs, French doors that opened into a large sunroom, an herb garden, and a backyard with soft grass and big trees. Darlene and her father planted tomatoes and made salads with the sweet, juicy fruit every Friday, all summer long.

To the Lomax children, the fenceless backyard was ripe for exploration, and it funneled them right to the yards of their neighbors. One yard belonged to two sisters who worked as special-education teachers—the first black people Darlene had met who had college degrees. As Lomax got to know these sisters, she began to think that perhaps her philosophy teacher was right: She, too, could go to college and someday buy a house of her own with glass doorknobs and a garden. She graduated from Rosemont College in 1985, and after a stint as a social worker, she enrolled at Temple University and got her teaching credential.

On February 19, 2013, Lomax was in the weekly faculty leadership meeting at Fairhill Elementary, a 126-year-old school in a historic Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia where she served as principal. A counselor was giving his report, but Lomax couldn’t hear what he said. She just stared at her computer screen, frozen, as she read a letter from the school superintendent. She read it again and again to make sure she understood what it said.

Then, slowly, she turned to Robert Harris, Fairhill’s special-education teacher for 20 years, and his wife, the counselor and gym teacher. “They are closing our school,” she said quietly. They all broke down weeping. Then they walked to the front of the building in silence and unlocked the doors to open the school for the day.

Five miles away, as Germantown High School prepared for its 100th anniversary, its principal was digesting the same letter. In all, 24 Philadelphia schools would be closed that year. These days, when Lomax visits her father in the house with the glass doorknobs, she drives by four shuttered school buildings, each with a “Property Available for Sale” sign.

Back when Lomax was a student in Philadelphia in the 1970s, local, state, and federal governments poured extra resources into these racially isolated schools—grand, elegant buildings that might look like palaces or city halls—to compensate for a long history of segregation. And they invested in the staff inside those schools, pushing to expand the teaching workforce and bring in more black and Latino teachers with roots in the community. Teaching was an essential path into the middle class, especially for African American women; it was also a nexus of organizing. During the civil rights movement, black educators were leaders in fighting for increased opportunity, including more equitable school funding and a greater voice for communities in running schools and districts.

But today, as buildings like Germantown High stand shuttered, these changes are slowly being rolled back. In Philadelphia and across the country, scores of schools have been closed, radically restructured, or replaced by charter schools. And in the process, the face of the teaching workforce has changed. In one of the most far-reaching consequences of the past decade’s wave of education reform, the nation has lost tens of thousands of experienced black teachers and principals.

According to the Albert Shanker Institute, which is funded in part by the American Federation of Teachers, the number of black educators has declined sharply in some of the largest urban school districts in the nation. In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers declined by 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, the black teacher population dropped by nearly 40 percent. And in New Orleans, there was a 62 percent drop in the number of black teachers.

Percentage Change in Teacher Population by Race and Ethnicity, 2002-2012

Many of these departures came as part of mass layoffs and closings in schools…Read More Here…

 

Why the Right Hates Ethnic History

Studies have shown that including Ethnic Studies as part of the core curriculum has a secondary effect of improving overall participation and academic achievement. Of course the usual Republican right wing racist suspects don’t like that…

The Ongoing Battle Over Ethnic Studies

A new study suggests that such courses can dramatically elevate the achievement of at-risk students. But is that enough proof that they’re worth the investment?

In Tucson, Arizona, Che Guevara posters and Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed are the spark that set off a heated conflict over ethnic studies that has made national headlines for years. For critics, including two former state schools superintendents, the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District is little more than divisive propaganda: “ethnic chauvinism” with a “very toxic effect … in an educational setting.” For supporters, reading literature on Chicano history in America and critical race theory is intended to close cultural gaps in the curriculum—and to close academic gaps for the district’s Hispanic students.

The intense controversy in Tucson over ethnic studies—best described as the study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of America’s diverse racial and ethnic groups—might seem like a new debate, but it’s over a century in the making. The educator and historian W.E.B. DuBois as early as the 1900s called for teaching black history in U.S. schools to challenge the prevailing narrative of black inferiority. More than half a century later, Freedom Schoolsemerged out of the 1960s civil-rights movement as alternative schools with a curriculum steeped in black culture and lessons drawn from black students’ lived experiences. About the same time the discipline of ethnic studies ignited on college campuses, as students of color considered the Eurocentric dominance in textbooks and lessons, and demanded multicultural courses.

Eventually the concept trickled down to K-12 schools. In 1994, Berkeley High in California became one of the first high schools in the country to offer ethnic studies, the program facing opposition even in a town known to be a bastion of progressive thinking. More recently, Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, added an ethnic-studies course to its high-school graduation requirements. (Interestingly, the country’s higher-education pioneer in the field is now struggling to stay afloat as budget cuts threaten the small, iconic program at San Francisco State University.)

For more than 20 years ethnic studies in American public schools has slowly evolved and grown, with the value for students becoming clearer over time. Yet even as enthusiasts have called for more ethnic-studies programs—and the debate rages on over making the identities of black, Asian, Native American, and Latino students the centerpiece of class instruction—notably absent was data linking culturally relevant pedagogy specifically to measurable student gains. This changed this year with new research that shows ethnic-studies classes boost student attendance, GPAs, and high-school credits for a key student group—a pivotal finding that brings hard evidence to the dispute over adding these courses in public schools….Read the Rest Here…

 

 

The HBCU As a Campaign Tool

Neither Bernie or Hillary has much of a depth of understanding about HBCUs. On the good side, HBCUs graduate a outsized number of black students in the STEM Fields. The bad news, is the bulk of those graduates actually only come from 3 schools. The worse news is that in all but the elite 3 HBCUs, the graduation rate is equal to or worse than that of even modest non-HBCU Schools.

If they really cared…or understood – what I think should be done is to finance the top 10 producing schools in terms of graduation rate. Give them the funding, grants, student of merchant loans to develop or expand curricula in the fields the country needs, and some mandates to reach certain goals such as graduation rate, acceptance to post-grad studies rates, and numbers enrolled in specific programs such as the STEM fields.

Governor Terry McAliffe of my state recently tried to attract high tech into the Norfolk area of the state by offering state incentives o Va Tech, Christopher Newport University, and UVa blindingly missing the fact that Norfolk is 53% minority, of which 42% is black, and one of the better HBCU’s with programs in the STEM Fields, Hampton University is located a stones throw away from the proposed new headquarters. And Hampton’s Engineering and Technology Department making Hampton is the first and only HBCU to have 100% control of a NASA Mission.

Would like to see something besides the usual smoke-and-mirrors here.

Misusing HBCUs as a Carrot for Black Voters

In a Democratic primary contest that hinges in part on black voters, the funding of historically black colleges and universities has become a major campaign issue. But, while both campaigns are talking about HBCUs, one is using them as a line of attack. Surrogates for Hillary Clinton have suggested that her higher-education plan is better for black students and HBCUs than that of her opponent Bernie Sanders. Not only are those surrogates wrong in their misuse of the schools, but they’re also wrong about the facts.

“By focusing exclusively on making public college free, Sanders’s plan wouldn’t spend a dime on private HBCUs and threatens roughly 50 percent of HBCUs that are not public,” said Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, in a statement issued by Clinton’s campaign weeks ago. Richmond continued in his criticism that Sanders’s higher-education plan leaves HBCUs “out in the cold.”

“As Senator Sanders promotes his HBCU tour, he owes it to the students to explain why half the HBCUs in the country aren’t worth any investment,” Richmond said.

James Clyburn, a Democratic Representative from South Carolina and a Clinton backer, doubled down on Richmond’s comments days before the South Carolina primary. “If you say that you’re going to have college—free two-year college—among public institutions, why would a student go to an HBCU? And most of which are private institutions,” Clyburn told NewsOne Now. “What will happen is these HBCUs will all close down all across America because they would not be able to afford to stay open.”

With both statements, Clyburn and Richmond leverage just how sacred HBCUs are to black voters while obscuring important context. HBCUs are indeed critical to the education of black students. Despite enrolling just 8 percent of black undergraduates, they award 15 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by black Americans. And as the congressmen suggest, HBCUs are grossly underfunded, operating on about an eighth of the average endowment of other institutions. The arguments made by the Clinton surrogates break down, however, with a close look at the composition of HBCUs and where they fit in the black education landscape.

There are an estimated 2,872,000 black students enrolled nationally at degree-granting postsecondary institutions. Of them, only 8 percent are enrolled at historically black colleges and universities. And of all the black students at HBCUs, only about a quarter are enrolled at private HBCUs. In all, a little more than 2 percent of all black college students are enrolled at private HBCUs. It is this small percentage of students that the Clinton surrogates have made the focus of their attacks on Sanders.

Then there are the details of both higher-education plans. Both Clinton and Sanders pledge to lower student-loan interest rates and allow those with existing debt to refinance their loans. That’s where the similarities end. The Sanders plan is marked by its proposal to make public colleges and universities free. In addition to that, Sanders proposes a dramatic increase to student aid, and the candidate recently stated his backing for a dedicated $30 billion fund to support private HBCUs and other “minority-serving institutions.”

The Clinton plan also has its distinctions. It proposes extending a popular higher-education tax credit, limiting student-loan repayment to just 10 percent of monthly income and increasing federal and state investment in public schools that serve low- and middle-income students. In addition, Clinton’s higher-education plan proposes that Pell grants be expanded to cover student living expenses. It also explicitly calls for a dedicated $25 billion fund to provide support to private nonprofit schools that serve low- and middle-income students.

While the Clinton plan creates and increases funding for which black students and HBCUs are eligible, it falls short of the kind of targeted investment the candidate’s surrogates suggest it has in their criticism of Sanders. And although the Sanders plan does not include institutional support for private HBCUs, it arguably does as much as Clinton’s to support their students while also proposing tuition-free education for the vast majority of black students—at public HBCUs (73 percent) and predominately white institutions (66 percent). To be sure, the private HBCU blind spot in Sanders’s higher-education plan is frustrating. Still, for black voters questioning the candidate’s commitment to black schools and higher education for black students more broadly, it’s worth considering the potential impact.

HBCUs have proven vital in educating black students and deserve the nation’s investment. They also warrant careful discussion. Painting HBCUs with broad strokes may make for an effective line of attack, but doing so obfuscates the multiple ways black students access education and the variety of support they require.

 

The Unequal Opportunity Race and White Resentment

The following is a video which has been shown at thousands of schools around the country which contextualizes racism and American history in terms of a track meet.  This video caused quite a storm recently in a county north of Richmond, Va,,,The old capital city of he confederacy. The county has banned the video. I guess it hit too close to home.

Parents outraged after students shown ‘white guilt’ cartoon for Black History Month

A Virginia school district has banned the use of an educational video about racial inequality after some parents complained that its messaging is racially divisive.

The four-minute, animated video — “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race” — was shown last week to students at an assembly at Glen Allen High School, in Henrico County, as a part of the school’s Black History Month program.

The video contextualizes historic racial disparity in the United States using the metaphor of a race track in which runners face different obstacles depending upon their racial background. It has been shown hundreds of thousands of times at schools and workshops across the country since it was created more than a decade ago, according to the African American Policy Forum, which produced it.

“The video is designed for the general public,” said Luke Harris, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum and an associate professor of political science at Vassar College. “We produced something you could show in elementary and secondary schools or in college studies courses.”

He added: “We found that the video has a huge impact on the people that we’re showing it to. Most of us know very little about the social history of the United States and its contemporary impact. It was designed as a tool to throw light on American history.”

But in Glen Allen, about 14 miles north of Richmond, some parents complained, calling it a “white guilt video.”

Henrico County Public Schools officials initially defended the video, saying it was “one component of a thoughtful discussion in which all viewpoints were encouraged.” But after the story began to spread nationally, school officials switched gears, labeling the video “racially divisive” two days later.

“The Henrico School Board and administration consider this to be a matter of grave concern,” School Board Chair Micky Ogburn said in a statement released to The Washington Post. “We are making every effort to respond to our community. It is our goal to prevent the recurrence of this type of event. School leaders have been instructed not to use the video in our schools.”

 

Scary 5 YO Black Boys in Kindergarten

There are disparate discipline rates of black vs white children…

We know that in the 13 states which allow corporal punishment in schools, black girls bear a disproportionate level of punishment

Black Parents favor spanking as punishment

A map of states which allow corporal punishment includes all but one the states of the confederacy, and is similar to a map of the current blue-red political divide…

It starts in pre-school…

Racism in the Kindergarten Classroom

New research finds faces of five-year-old black boys put whites in a more threat-conscious state of mind.

If the current election cycle hasn’t convinced you that racism has yet to be eradicated, consider this: The mere image of a black man is enough to stimulate an automatic threat response in whites. Research has found faces of African-American males are more likely to be perceived as angry, and can trigger neural activity associated with rapid detection of danger.

While even pre-teens can stimulate this reaction (which helps explain the tragic shooting of a 12 year old holding a pellet gun in Cleveland two years ago), it presumably doesn’t apply to very young black boys. It’s hard to believe they are perceived as dangerous as they emerge from the womb.

So when do they start coming across as threatening? Newly published researchprovides a depressing answer: by the time they enter kindergarten.

Participants misidentified safe words as threatening more often after seeing a black face.

In a series of studies, a University of Iowa research team led by Andrew Todd finds images of the faces of five-year-old black boys are sufficient to trigger whites into heightened-threat mode. “Implicit biases commonly observed for black men appear to generalize even to young black boys,” the researchers write in the journal Psychological Science.

The first of their experiments featured 63 college undergraduates, who “completed a categorization task in which two images flashed on the monitor in quick succession. Participants were instructed to ignore the first time, which was always a face; it merely signaled that the second image was about to appear. Their task was to quickly and accurately categorize the second image (the target object) as a gun or a toy, by pressing one of two response keys.”

In fact, the faces—all of five-year-old boys with neutral facial expressions—were a key component of the experiment. Six of them featured black children, and six white. Researchers wanted to know whether the race of the child would affect the speed and accuracy of the white participants’ responses.

It did. “Participants identified guns more quickly after black-child primes than after white-child primes,” the researchers report, “whereas they identified toys more quickly after the white-child primes than after black-child primes.”

Subsequent experiments found black five-year-old faces produced just as strong an effect as photographs of adult black males. This held true when white participants were labeling images as guns or tools, and when they were shown a list of words (including “criminal” and “peaceful”) and asked to categorize each as “safe” or “threatening.”

In that last experiment, participants misidentified safe words as threatening more often after seeing a black face, and misidentified threatening words as safe more often after seeing a white one—child or adult.

“These racial biases were driven entirely by differences in automatic processing,” Todd and his colleagues write. In other words, no conscious thought was involved; whites simply saw a black male face and reacted in ways that indicated a heightened level of perceived threat.

Even when the face was that of a five-year-old.

 

Snow Days!

Fun Graphic, considering the blizzard in my area today. Yeah – we have about 30″ right now, and still coming down at my house. The neighborhood snow-bunnies rushed out this AM to shovel the walk and clean their cars…The problem being it has snowed another 12″ since then, and with the 40 MPH wind whipping – erased most of their labor.

Map: ‘How Much Snow It Typically Takes to Cancel School in the U.S.’

The geography of the snow day, courtesy of Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy

 

How much snow does it take to close the schools?

Weather-related school closings are a constant source of anxiety this time of year. Sometimes the anxiety is generational: “They never canceled school in my day,” parents and grandparents complain when a new snow day gets announced. Sometimes it’s regional. D.C. isn’t as “flinty” as Chicago, President Obama sighed when schools closed during his first winter in the capital. Northernerswatched in puzzlement as two inches of snow crippled Atlanta earlier this week.

A new map from Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy (a.k.a. atrubetskoy) is sure to stoke this regional competition. Using data “taken from hundreds of various points from user responses…interpolated using NOAA’s average annual snowfall days map,” Trubetskoy made a map showing how much snow it typically takes to close schools in the U.S. and Canada. Notice that for much of the southern U.S., all it takes is “any snow” to shut schools down. For the Upper Midwest and Canada, two feet of snow are required for a closure.

Trubetskoy includes the following clarifications:

1. In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation (“cold days”). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas.
2. Many jurisdictions in California and other western states have significantly varied snowfall, depending on elevation. This makes it difficult to find an “average” number, or often makes it misleading.
3. Urban areas like Chicago and New York have more resources to clear snow and often need more to cause closings.
4. Clarification: The lightest green says “any snow” but also includes merely the prediction of snow.
5. Clarification II: This is snow accumulation over 24 hours/overnight.
6. Hawaii does get snow! Just… not where people live….

 

Republican Pedophile Assistance Act

Some creep telling my little ones to expose themselves is likely to be eating a 44 caliber sandwich if I get there before the Police do…

So now we have a right-wing pervert trying to make it a requirement for “inspections” of children’s genitals!

Virginia GOP bill would require schools to verify children’s genitals before using restroom

Republican child molesting  POS Virginia Del. Mark Cole

A Bill filed by a Virginia lawmaker this week would require schools to be certain that children are using the restroom corresponding to their “correct anatomical sex.”

The legislation, which would prohibit transgender students from using the bathroom matching their gender, is being sponsored by Republican Del. Mark Cole.

House Bill 663 defines “anatomical sex” as “the physical condition of being male or female, which is determined by a person’s anatomy.”

“Local school boards shall develop and implement policies that require every school restroom, locker room, or shower room that is designated for use by a specific gender to solely be used by individuals whose anatomical sex matches such gender designation,” the measure states.

Under the bill, any student who violated the bathroom rules could be fined $50 by law enforcement. Schools would have the discretion of allowing students to use a “single stall restroom or shower” or to have “controlled” access to an otherwise unoccupied restroom.

Cole’s legislation would also allow law enforcement to fine anyone who knowingly used a public restroom that did not correspond to their “anatomical sex.”

Civil rights advocate Tim Peacock noted that “adults would be required to inspect children’s genitals before they use the bathroom” for the legislation to be enforceable.

“This is what the conservative movement has devolved into: forcing children to allow adults to examine their genitals out of misplaced fear that transgender kids and adults might commit a hypothetical never-before-seen act of violence or sexual aggression (that would still be against the law with or without transgender protections),” Peacock wrote.

 

Dystopian Racist View of Black College Students

 

I’ll take this one apart out front – so you don’t have to.

1. University of Missouri is not a “selective School”
2. The lie about “very large admissions preferences” is belied by the fact that the numbers of African-American kids at the top 100 selective universities has flatlined or gone down.
3. To white racist like this writer, there are only two types of black kids on campus – those on athletic scholarship or those unqualified because of “affirmative action”.
4. Black kids have increased their proportion of STEM degrees. The numbers of master’s degrees earned by Black and Hispanic students more than doubled from 1999–2000 to 2009–10 (increasing by 109 percent and 125 percent, respectively).
5. 72% of black students earning STEM Bachelors do so at HBCUs, with Howard University graduating 33% of all black students with STEM Degrees. They are 3 times more likely than their white counterparts to pursue Master’s and Doctoral Degrees, usually at selective Universities. About 90% of all black Students earn Bachelors/Masters/PHds in the US, do so at schools east of the Mississippi.
6. Although 22% of white students enroll in STEM, only 6% are awarded degrees in 4 years. 21% of black students enroll in STEM, and 3% graduate in 4 years. The differential is not significant, as it tends to level out in 6 years where 16% of black, Hispanic, and white kids gain Bachelors.  The difference between Asian students and whites is very significant, in that 30% of Asian kids who enter the STEM curriculum graduate.
7. Many lower level and mid-range schools still use academic testing in terms of the SAT and ACT. Most of the selective schools have either dropped the SAT/ACT entirely or made it optional. There is no difference in graduation rates between those that use the SAT and those that don’t – proving SAT Score are irrelevant. Indeed, differences in SAT scores are largely arbitrary and can be influenced heavily by coaching, which typically in unaffordable by lower-middle income parents.

So what we got here, is another group of racist lies in an attempt to discredit black students because they are (successfully) protesting.

A LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD ENGINE OF CAMPUS UNREST: RACIAL ADMISSIONS PREFERENCES

They are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like?

The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.

Most are, rather, victims of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.

The reality is that most good black and Hispanic students, who would be academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they attend.

That’s why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. An inevitable result is that many black and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic students cannot keep up with better-prepared classmates and rank low in their classes no matter how hard they work.

Studies show that this academic “mismatch effect” forces them to drop science and other challenging courses; to move into soft, easily graded, courses disproportionately populated by other preferentially admitted students; and to abandon career hopes such as engineering and pre-med. Many lose intellectual self-confidence and become unhappy even if they avoid flunking out.

This depresses black performance at virtually all selective schools because of what experts call the cascade effect. Here’s how it works, as Richard Sander and I demonstrated in a 2012 book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It:

Only 1 to 2 percent of black college applicants emerge from high school well-qualified academically for (say) the top Ivy League colleges. Therefore, those schools can meet their racial admissions targets only by using large preferences. They bring in black students who are well qualified for moderately elite schools like (say) the University of North Carolina, but not for the Ivies that recruit them. This leaves schools like UNC able to meet their own racial targets only by giving large preferences to black students who are well qualified for less selective schools like (say) the University of Missouri but not for UNC. And so on down the selectivity scale.

As a result, experts agree, most black students at even moderately selective schools — with high school preparation and test scores far below those of their classmates — rank well below the middle of their college and grad school classes, with between 25% and 50% ranking in the bottom tenth. That’s a very bad place to be at any school.

This, in turn, increases these students’ isolation and self-segregation from the higher-achieving Asians and whites who flourish in more challenging courses. At least one careful study shows that students are more likely to become friends with peers who are similar in academic accomplishment.

Put yourself in the position of manyHispanic and especially black students (recipients of by far the largest racial preferences) at selective schools, who may work heroically during the first semester only to be lost in many classroom discussions and dismayed by their grades.

As they start to see the gulf between their own performance and that of most of their fellow students, dismay can become despair. They soon realize that no matter how hard they work, they will struggle academically.

It is critical to understand that these are not bad students. They did well in high school and could excel at somewhat less selective universities where they would arrive roughly as well prepared as their classmates.

But due to racial preferences, they find themselves for the first time in their lives competing against classmates who have a huge head start in terms of previous education, academic ability, or both.

Researchers have shown that racial preference recipients develop negative perceptions of their own academic competence, which in turn harms their performance and even their mental health, through “stereotype threat” and other problems. They may come to see themselves as failures in the eyes of their families, their friends, and themselves.

Such mismatched minority students are understandably baffled and often bitter about why this is happening to them. With most other minority students having similar problems, their personal academic struggles take on a collective, racial cast….Read the Rest Here if you can stomach it…

 

The New Jim Crow – The Paper Bag Test and School Suspensions

Not really surprised about the stats on how minority children are expelled at rates from 3-15 times greater than white kids. That seems par for the course depending on educational district and mindset. And with School “Resource” Officers arresting black and Hispanic kids at double digit rates higher than white kids – that follows pretty much with the police criminalization of minority youth.

What is interesting is within the minority groups – Who is expelled. It hearkens back to the Jim Crow days.

Guess who gets expelled…

Lessons in Brutality

It’s shocking to watch a black student violently arrested in school. What is more shocking is how common it is.

…Since 1995, juvenile incarceration has dropped by more than 40 percent. In the same time frame, however, out-of-school suspensions have increased 10 percent, doubling the total from 1970. As reporters Dara Lind and Libby Nelson explain for Vox, this stems from several trends.

The crime waves of the 1980s and early 1990s sparked deep concern in schools across the country. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act, which mandated specific penalties for carrying weapons in schools. Zero tolerance was national policy, and school districts devised their own codes meant to stop minor incidents before they blossomed into major ones, a public school analogue to the “broken windows” policies in places like New York City. What’s more, crime fears—as well as the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado—led to more police officers in schools as well: The number of “school resource officers” increased 38 percent to more than 13,000 in 2007, up from 9,446 in 1997…

In public school districts around the country, arrests have increased with the presence of school resource officers, even as juvenile crime rates have decreased. Even adjusting for poverty—which tends to correlate with safety—the total arrest rate in schools with officers was almost three times the rate for schools without them. “About 92,000 students were arrested in school during the 2011–2012 school year,” notes Vox. “And most of those were low-level violations.”

As is often true, from the war on drugs to mass incarceration, the brunt of this punitive policy falls hardest on black and Latino Americans. From 1972 to 2010, the school suspension rate for whites in middle and high school climbed from 6 percent to 7.1 percent. For Latinos it climbed from 6.1 to 12 percent. For blacks it more than doubled from 11.8 percent to 24.3 percent…

In 2007, 70 percent of in-school arrests were of black and Latino students. Overall,according to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, 16 percent versus 5 percent. This is true for all ages: “Black children,” notes the DOE, “represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.” White students, by contrast, “represent 43 percent of preschool enrollment but 26 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.” Students of color with disabilities are also more likely to be restrained or suspended: Black students constitute 21 percent of all students with disabilities, but 44 percent of those subject to mechanical restraints.

In some states, suspension rates are almost unbelievable. In the 2011–2012 school year, Missouri suspended 14.4 percent of its black elementary students, compared with just 1.8 percent of its white students. Florida suspended 5.1 percent of its elementary students and 19 percent of its middle and high school students. And Wisconsin suspended a mind-blowing 34 percent of all enrolled black students in a single year.

It should be said that, echoing the incident at Spring Valley High School, black girls—and dark-skinned black girls in particular—are disproportionately punished in schools. “Black girls in public elementary and secondary schools nationwide were suspended at a rate of 12 percent, compared with a rate of just 2 percent for white girls, and more than girls of any other race or ethnicity,” writes the New York Times, adding that “black girls with the darkest skin tones were three times more likely to be suspended than black girls with the lightest skin.”

You might look at this and wonder if it’s behavior. Do black and Latino students act worse than white ones? Do black girls behave worse than white ones? The answer is no. “Despite higher rates of school suspensions for black, latino, and Native American students, there appear to be few racial differences in the offenses most likely to lead to zero tolerance policy violations,” write researchers at Indiana University. Instead, these students are referred for less serious and more subjective offenses.

In general, notes the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University, “Research suggests that when given an opportunity to choose among several disciplinary options for a relatively minor offense, teachers and school administrators often choose more severe punishment for black students than for white students for the same offense.” In fact, according to one study of Texas schools, 97 percent of suspensions were the choice of administrators, as only 3 percent of students had broken rules that required such punishment. But the weight of those discretionary suspensions fell on black students—they were 31 percent more likely to be suspended, even controlling for a host of other variables.

At all ages, black students are perceived as more dangerous and unruly. And to that point, at least one analysis shows that teachers hold lower expectations of black and Latino children compared with their white peers. When mixed with zero-tolerance discipline and school police officers, you have a recipe for wide disparities in treatment. A 2011 study of North Carolina schools from the National Education Policy Center found that 32 percent of black students were suspended for first-time offense of cellphone use at school, compared with just 15 percent of white students. For a first-time offense of public display of affection, almost 43 percent of accused black students were suspended, compared with about 15 percent of white students…Read the whole article here…

 

Republican in Mississippi Lets Racist Cat Out of the Bag

Yep…Dem ebil black folks is going to steal you hard workin’ white folks money…

Busted: Watch Mississippi lawmaker openly race-baiting at GOP rally to oppose black school funding

Video shot by a local radio broadcaster caught Republican Mississippi state Rep. Bubba Carpenter using racial language to suggest to fellow Republicans that a ballot initiative to improve education was actually a plot to fund black schools at a cost to white schools.

The Clarion-Ledger reported that Carpenter was filmed by WMRG while speaking to the Tishomingo County Midway Republican Rally about the danger of Initiative 42, which would give a Hinds County judge control of school funding if the Mississippi legislature failed to lift the state from its last place national ranking on education.

According to the Clarion-Ledger, Republicans in the state had been using the phrase “Hinds County judge” as a racial dog whistle because the county is predominately black and has two female black judges.

But Carpenter dropped the coded language in a plea to defeat the initiative.

“If 42 passes in its form, a judge in Hinds County, Mississippi, predominantly black — it’s going to be a black judge — they’re going to tell us where the state education money goes,” the lawmaker warned. “So what’s he going to do? ‘[Predominately white] Tishomingo County, you’ve got a little bit of extra money, we’re going to take a little bit of that — I can see the happening, it may not, but I can see it — we’re going to help [schools in predominately black] Rolling Fork because they don’t have as good a tax base as you guys do, so we’re going take a little bit of that money and we’re going to to transition it to Rolling Fork.’”

Carpenter promised the crowd that Gov. Phil Bryant and other top Republicans would “tell you the same thing.”

“There it is, folks,” the Clarion-Ledger‘s Sam Hall wrote. “Let’s all thank Bubba Carpenter for saying what he means and illustrating to the world the filthy rhetoric that still passes for political discourse by some here.”

 

Why Charter Schools Won’t Die

While at one of the downtown festivals a few weeks ago the subject of Charter Schools came up in casual conversation with a white friend who is involved in local politics. Over the past several years, the Charter School movement has been a disaster in DC, with one school after another either failing, or failing to provide the same level of education for the City’s bad Public Schools. My friend responded that the Charter School movement was now being driven by Gentrification. That the young, hipster white parents moving into the old neighborhoods didn’t want any part of the failing DC Public School System, and as such were the force behind continuing Charters.

This article sums up what is happening…

Burroughs School in NE Washington, DC in 1955

Why White Parents Won’t Choose Black Schools

Last year when I attempted to pick my daughter up from school, the volunteers in the carpool line tried to put a fourth grader in my car, not the four year old I was attempting to retrieve. Both of us were vehemently shaking our heads, both of us looked totally confused, but the man with the radio would not be deterred. There are only a handful of white kids at my daughter’s school, and only two of them are car-riders. One of them gets picked up by her mom, the other, her dad. This white girl went with the white mom, and I was a white mom. This must be the right van.

This slightly awkward, but hilarious interaction strikes at the heart of the change in our neighborhood. While we were once one of the only white people in the neighborhood, most of the abandoned houses are now snapped up and fixed up by young white couples, often with kids. Those kids don’t go to our school.

Though my daughter is not the only white kindergartner in my neighborhood, she is the only white kindergartner in her class. My new neighbors, ones who come into the neighborhood raving about how much they love it, do not send their kids to the school. While they love my neighborhood, they do not love my school.

A friend and I were recently chatting about her move to the neighborhood next to mine. I was surprised that she didn’t even look across the dividing line road we live about two blocks from. She shrugged her shoulders, “yeah, I really like your house but our real estate agent said we shouldn’t even look there because of the schools.” Because of the schools. The school I send my daughter to. She did not look at the houses with more square footage and a smaller price tag because someone who has never been in the school doesn’t find it suitable.

This summer, when I told the other moms at the pool where my kids went to school. I was repeatedly told to move them. This from women who had never ever set foot in my school. They had not had contact with our deeply passionate, and very responsive principal, had not met the pre-k teachers who my daughter loves more than Santa. They had not toured the various science labs, or listened as their child talked incessantly about robotics. They don’t know that every Tuesday Juliet comes home with a new Spanish song to sing and bothers me until I look up the colors in Spanish if I can’t remember them from High school. Juliet loves her school. Her mother, a teacher at a suburban school, and her father, a PhD candidate at the state university, both find the school completely acceptable, more than acceptable. We love it too.

But my neighbors will not send their kids there and my friends won’t even move into the neighborhood. They will whisper about it. They will tell their friends not to go there. They will even tell a stranger that she should move her kids immediately as they both wait for their children to come down the water slide. But they will not give the neighborhood school a chance. They will even go to great lengths to avoid the neighborhood school.

In July, through the neighborhood list serve I got invited to attend the charter school exploration meeting. A group of parents were attempting to start a charter school to center on diversity. They wanted a Spanish program and a principal that was very invested in the neighborhood. After inquiring I discovered the local elementary school had not even been contacted. The one with a principal who left his high profile high school job and came back to his neighborhood to an elementary school where he immediately implemented a Spanish language program. Before starting their own charter school, not one person had bothered even contacting the school already in existence. The school that has made huge strides, and could do even better with some parents who had this kind of time and know how. No one was interested in the school of the neighborhood.

The same people who were questioning the school I picked for my girls and starting their own charter school, wanted to talk to me about the This American Life Podcast about segregated schools. They wanted to talk to me about things I already knew. Our schools are more segregated than they have ever been. Our educational system is deeply inequitable. Things are only getting worse. They shook their concerned liberal head in sadness wondering what they could do. Then they made sure their child got into the very white, pretty affluent charter school that is not representative of their neighborhood. When one didn’t exist, they took their resources and began creating one.

When I am able to move past the anger, the frustration that people are talking about a school they know nothing about, I listen to what they say. Behind all the test score talk, the opportunity mumbo jumbo that people lead with, I feel like what is actually being said, and what is never being said is this: That school is too black. …The rest here…