Wow, you can't make this stuff up. Check out how an Arizona school district is creatively dealing with a difficult problem.

"Tucson schools determine to fix minority discipline rates"

by Heather Mac Donald
(in City Journal)

"As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson’s school district adopted racial quotas in school discipline this summer. Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district “Equity Team” and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their minority discipline rates. The Tucson equity plan shows that when Hispanics replace blacks as the dominant ethnic minority, as in Tucson and throughout the Southwest, the regime of double standards for behavior remains unchanged . . ."

http://www.city-journal.org

This kind of material produces an almost "psychedelic" explosion of unreality. How can this be possible? How can people really think like this? What kind of insanely broken world do we now inhabit?

One can only conclude that it's a new kind of "cold war," not between superpowers, but an almost psychotically patient guerrilla insurgency by and for "tribes" of culturally-purified zealots who seek victory* at any cost.

*Definition: Your loss is my gain.

Yes, of course, a stupid idea. But why the knee-jerk attack on Obama. You're in a states-right country, and public education is part of a noble, conservative states-right tradition. I say, love it or leave it.

Matt, you exhaust me. It's not a knee jerk attack on Obama. It's quite the opposite. You really should be able to see that. And as for suggesting that I ought to leave this country if I don't like what's happened to public education (I am myself entirely a product of public schools) -- just stop. Is that what you'd say to Arne Duncan--who also has problems with the public schools? More to the point--if you don't like this site, why don't *you* leave *it*? You've followed me and hassled me and harassed me and trolled me since 2001. Everyone else from Penn got tired of it long ago, and they got their pound of flesh when I quit. I have tolerated your posting here for years because I really don't have much choice. You've been banned before under other names, when your persona was far more openly hostile and nasty. But you have always come back, with new names and new IP addresses. I don't know why you do, and I can't stop you. But I don't think your interest in me or this site is healthy or honest and I do wish you would go away.

Speaking as one of Erin's devoted readers, I second her request: "Luther," please go away.

I'll third that. Matt/Luther is a troll, nothing more.

I suspect he would do well to get some therapy.

One of the many sad things about this news item is that lab science, properly done, could be an effective way of stimulating interest in many kids who aren't very verbal. (The same is true for shop classes.)

Schools in this country seem to be run mainly by people who live in a mental universe comprised only of *words* and, occasionally, of other symbols (math, compueter code.) But there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

This is not good news for sure, but just to play devil’s advocate here: I look back on my (public) high school years amazed at the level of math and science that I was expected to master -- really understand well -- in contrast to the incredibly poor language skills that nearly everyone emerged with and nobody seemed bothered by. I’m thinking not only of skills in written and spoken English, about which educators usually do some ritual hand-wringing. I’m thinking of LOEs especially. It is incredibly rare to meet someone who comes out of high school actually able to hold down a conversation in French/Spanish/German, and nobody seems very perturbed by this. I’m going to be a lot more sympathetic to worries about kids not having mastered vector analysis when I see more serious concern from educators about Anglophones being, in the words of The Economist, God’s worst linguists.

Erin, I think you've shown remarkable patience with Matt, seemingly forever.

As I've said before, I think he's obsessed with you, and I hope he takes your invitation to depart and goes his merry way.

And to you Matt: I think you are obsessed with Erin, and I believe that is not good for either you or her. Please — just go away. Get a life, one without Erin or CM in it.

Jerry:
I agree with your point about the language learning issue, but you're missing the point. (Whether purposefully or not I don't know.) Imagine that there were major achievement disparities in foreign language classes between racial groups at a particular high school. Would the school do anyone any good by canceling all language classes? Berkeley High's Governance Council is about to put into effect a plan that is intellectually and morally indefensible. The language capability of Americans irrelevant to this story.

This bad--very bad--but rather than seeing it merely as a "guerilla insurgency" by "culturally-purified zealots," it might be fruitful to ponder the effects of NCLB, with its focus (for better or worse) on testing and the performance of disadvantaged subgroups.

As for the Luther thing, I don't know what happened at Penn, but his contributions here have been pretty civil, especially compared with some of the nastiness coming from other posters.

"But I don't think your interest in me or this site is healthy or honest and I do wish you would go away."

That would be best. His posts, however, do give your readers a glimpse of the narrow world from which your journey has led, and of its mean-spirited inhabitants. For your honesty and integrity, and for your courage in accepting the full cost of being better than them, Ms. O'Connor, a stranger salutes you and wishes you a happy new year.

Peter, if you didn't sound like an ideological clone of Luther, I might be less "nasty."

TG: As I said, this is definitely not good news. But to respond to your point, let me ask you: are there major achievement disparities in foreign language classes between racial groups in American high schools? Does anyone know? Because my sense is that nobody cares enough about language learning to have ever bothered to find out. Language is a complete non-issue in American secondary education; math and science are obsessions. There is no hand-wringing on the right that we need to get serious on standards (either you can read Cervantes or you flunk!) and no hand wringing on the left that we need to be more warm and fuzzy (just let them write little essays in German about their feelings!). So I just wonder why it is that stories (like this one) about dopey ideas for improving students' self esteem, like stories laying out narratives about declining standards, are almost always about math and science, and every once in a while about English or history. It is as though these are the only subjects that really matter in secondary education, and I think that kind of orthodoxy is obscuring important problems in the kind of citizenship-formation that American high schools are providing.

Thank you, FunkyPhD, John, Minerva, and Macumazahan. I truly appreciate your well wishes.

Peter, with respect, you don't know the history or the facts, and I don't intend to rehearse them here.

FWIW, Matt has attempted to post twice more on this thread. I'm exercising my right to regard this blog as a virtual equivalent of my home, and am acting on many years of accumulated wishes that if I just ignored him long enough, he would go away. He's not welcome here, he has never been here for the right reasons, and I am not posting his comments.

Happy new year, everyone, and here's to productive, engaged discussion in 2010!

"Happy new year, everyone, and here's to productive, engaged discussion in 2010!"

Amen. Erin, you have had your share of trolls in the past and I don't know why. You certainly don't deserve them. I guess trolls have to react when their tails are pulled.

I get the need to be responsive to data telling us where resources need to be allocated. What bothers me about this story is that I've always been troubled by the assertion that we need to close gaps without any discussion of how that is to be done. You can close a gap by bringing the bottom up, or by bringing the top down. Are these equally desirable strategies? What if you implement education reforms that cause the lowest-scoring kids to improve 50% but the top-scoring 75%? You've improved everyone's education but you've widened the gap; so is that not a good thing?

it might be fruitful to ponder the effects of NCLB, with its focus (for better or worse) on testing and the performance of disadvantaged subgroups.

I've pondered the 'effects' of testing. They do not bother me.

The problem here is not testing, but an institutional culture in which imparting knowledge is not a priority.

The thing that amazes me is that this is Berkeley, the home of one of the foremost universities in the state (at least, outside of Poli Sci), if not the country.

This will certainly cut off the pipeline from Berkeley High to Berkeley U.

GOSH that's depressing.

Art Deco,

Isn't mandated testing, and the use of the results of testing to determine funding, one of the factors that goes into creating an institutional culture that either prioritizes or devalues the "imparting of knowledge"? I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with testing per se, but we can hardly deny that it shapes institutional culture. On a positive side, it encourages accountability; on the less positive side, it can bureaucratize educational culture. (Here, I'm not just thinking of NCLB, but the French national education, with its rigid, hierarchical system of concours, jurys, filières, etc.)

So, no the problem isn't testing itself, but we do need to be aware of how testing is *used*.

My regrets. I assumed too much about your position.

I do not see much purpose to the central government intervening in the provision of schooling except to break obstructive vested interests (which it does not do at this time).

I think required participation in regents examinations is a necessity for purposes of quality control in a network of schools funded solely by vouchers and donations and run entirely by free-standing philanthropic agencies who are regulated but lightly by the state registrar of corporations and the state tax collector. Let these schools teach what they please and engage in whatever exercises in social promotion they please. The students do not get their regents' certificate until they pass the examination series they have elected to take. These schools would be subject to the penal law, to health and safety regulations, and to the common-and-garden regulations which apply to any philanthropy. He who gets the parents gets the cash. If their students perform in the bottom 2% of the league tables assembled by the board of regents, they lose their charters. If they engage in proscribed financial practices, they get prosecuted by the state attorney-general.