In bid to close racial achievement gap, Berkeley High plans to eliminate “white” science labs
Since every previous attempt to eliminate the racial achievement gap has failed, what makes the leftists at Berkeley think that this one will succeed? Of course they know it won’t succeed, Of course they know that the racial achievement gap will remain. But as gnostic leftists who believe that this world is fundamentally unjust and who are committed to the construction of a new, just world, they can never give up. They must do everything they can possibly do—including downgrading and even destroying education for capable students—to try to raise up the incapable.
The undated story appears in the East Bay Express:
Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
By Eric Klein
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.
Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. “The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School’s science department, at last week’s school board meeting.
Sicular-Mertens, who has taught science at BHS for 24 years, said the possible cuts will impact her black students as well. She says there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino. “As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need to find satisfaction and success in their education,” she told the board.
The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at its January 13 meeting. Generally, such agenda items are passed without debate, but if the school board chooses to play a more direct role in the High School Redesign, it could bring the item back as an action item at a future meeting.
School district spokesman Mark Coplan directed inquiries about the redesign to Richard Ng, the principal’s assistant at Berkeley High and member of the School Governance Council. Ng did not return repeated calls for comment
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James N. writes:
I’ve been waiting for you to write about this.
I want you to answer your own question, directed so often at the usual suspects: “OK, you’ve named the problem (Islam in the West). WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT?”
Except this problem isn’t Muslims in the West. It’s Negroes in academic high schools. But the general thrust is similar.
Lab science is meant for people with IQs of 115 and up. Based on a Berkeley 15-19 year old population of 7,978, 59 percent white and 13.6 percent black (U.S. Census 2000), there are 755 white teenagers with IQs of 115 or better, and 27 blacks. (Based on 16 percent of whites having IQ of 115 or over, and 2.5 percent of blacks having IQ of 115 or over; excerpted from Daniel Seligman, A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, pp. 150-153.)
Now, there are plenty of whites with IQs one standad deviation below the white mean. None of them are in science labs—you can bet on that.
But virtually all the blacks are one standard deviation or more below the white mean. There aren’t enough blacks with IQs of 115 in Berkeley that are interested in science to have a science lab in a phone booth.
Do you think that the blacks who attend Berkeley High School are UNAWARE of the huge gap between whites and themselves? Do you think they feel GOOD going to a school where the only way they can pass is by fake grades and unctious condescension?
Some of them are no doubt depressed by this. But more, I would venture to guess, are sullen or hostile, and no small fraction of those with IQs of 85 and below act out their feelings violently.
Most high schools deal with this by denial, or by fraud. The Berkeley School Committee has taken the bull by the horns, and decided to eliminate classes for the 16 percent of whites who are smart (and the 2.5 percent of blacks who are smart) so as not to run an institution that throws their weaknesses in the faces of their black students every day.
That’s THEIR solution. What’s yours?
LA replies:
(1) Whites assert themselves again as America’s culturally and political dominant majority; (2) this revivified white majority eliminates most anti-discrimination legislation; allowing (3) a return to natural residential and education segregation, in which pupils can attend schools suitable for their abilities, schools without (a) black intimidation of whites, (b) white fear of blacks, (c) black feelings of inferiority toward whites, and (d) the hideous ideology and propaganda of today’s racially integrated schools.
James continues:
I didn’t mean my last email to sound accusatory. I have no idea what to do about the problem of blacks in mixed public schools. Obviously, they belong to us in a way that the Muslims do not.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2010 04:39 PM | Send