Berkeley HS to drop science teachers and labs to battle achievement gap

[Slyhawk]

Awesome. :sad:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/berkeley-high-may-cut-out-science-labs/Content?oid=1536705

[HFBM]

crazy.

[Mr. Hawk]

Fork -> Us.

[DoeyHawk]

No more unfair advantages for whitey.

[OlePeep]

Who is John Gault?

[PhilHartman]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

[MikeyJoe]

Long, but a worthwhile read:

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his state-ment is false in fact, that he is no more equal to every- one he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist-measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food. "Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I - it must be a vile, upstage, lah-di-dah affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs thinks him-self too good for them no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox he's one of those goddam highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic."

Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it make it respectable and even laudable by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be honest, chaste, or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite."

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal and Regular and Like Folks and Integrated, increasingly tend to become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it suspects. ("Since, whatever I do, the neighbours are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and become one in reality.") As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of HelL

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, over-all movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them "tyrants'* then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, "democracy." But now democracy" can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.From "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" by C.S. Lewis.

[Rolo Tomassi]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

Either that, or don't send your kids to government schools.

[PhilHartman]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

Either that, or don't send your kids to government schools.

While I agree that would be a good alternative, if you think the problem here is one of a government vs. private school you're badly missing the point.

[DoeyHawk]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

Either that, or don't send your kids to government schools.

I have a great idea. We should allow parents to allocate their property/school tax dollars to any school of their choice. The "bad" schools would have to improve or they'd simply have no students and thus no funding to pay teachers, admins, etc.

Oh, wait, I guess that's not "fair" either.

[Rolo Tomassi]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

Either that, or don't send your kids to government schools.

While I agree that would be a good alternative, if you think the problem here is one of a government vs. private school you're badly missing the point.

Uh, actually no, I'm not.

[PdJohnson]

For the record, my old middle school just cut all extra-curricular activities to make budget. Everything! no band, no student council, not even basketball! The school now only offers classes and thats it.

In related news, the middle school on the more Caucasian side of town 5 blocks away just finished their complete redesign with new gym, band room etc. Sweet.

[Slyhawk]

For the record, my old middle school just cut all extra-curricular activities to make budget. Everything! no band, no student council, not even basketball! The school now only offers classes and thats it.

In related news, the middle school on the more Caucasian side of town 5 blocks away just finished their complete redesign with new gym, band room etc. Sweet.

Same district? I don't see how they can get away with that, if all of the funding is public.

[PdJohnson]

I think they split the schools into different districts.

[Aloha Mr. Hand]

That's sad. Whoever says the average black man's failure to take care of their kids only impacts their own children's lives is wrong.

It's also an excellent logical reason to not send your kids to school with large minority populations... unless those minorities are Asians... their culture isn't complete shit.

Either that, or don't send your kids to government schools.

I have a great idea. We should allow parents to allocate their property/school tax dollars to any school of their choice. The "bad" schools would have to improve or they'd simply have no students and thus no funding to pay teachers, admins, etc.

Oh, wait, I guess that's not "fair" either.

That's how they did it in Canada when we lived there.

[PhilHartman]

For the record, my old middle school just cut all extra-curricular activities to make budget. Everything! no band, no student council, not even basketball! The school now only offers classes and thats it.

In related news, the middle school on the more Caucasian side of town 5 blocks away just finished their complete redesign with new gym, band room etc. Sweet.

Erections have consequences.