"EBONICS" IS FOR LOSERS

"Academics sometimes are too book smart for their own good. Overintellectualizing anything is not necessarily a good thing, and Ebonics proves it. It is beyond me how anyone can take poor English skills and attribute that to another language. I don't think poor English skills should be an goal to be aspired to, much less, attained. I have to agree with those that say that possessing these skills will not help gain a professional career, let alone just a regular job.

Twenty years or so ago, I had an African American woman work for me in a telemarketing firm where I was office manager. One of the requirements there was that English had to be spoken clearly and concisely. It was essential that good English speaking skills were utilized, or customers on the phone couldn't understand what was being said, which was, of course, detrimental to our business.

I remember her telling me that she was having problems with her teenage daughter, who insisted on speaking this so-called "Black English". My co-worker went on to say that she was the daughter of a college professor who insisted that she learn to speak "the King's English", as that was basic to being able to get and hold a decent job.

Her daughter's friends, on the other hand, were saying that speaking "the King's English" meant that she was pretending to be "white". My co-worker was having a tough time convincing her daughter that speaking proper English had nothing to do with what race you were, and had everything to do with your success in life. I often wonder if she prevailed in getting this across to her daughter.

As office manager, I was in charge of hiring. I was turned in to the labor board on at least two occasions for refusing to hire an African American who couldn't speak good English. I was accused of discrimination. Each time, I won the suit because I employed other African Americans who COULD and DID speak proper English.

Even today, I cringe when I hear this "street English". I'm sick of going to a fast food restaurant, where so many young African Americans work, and can't understand a word they're saying, and they apparently can't understand me either, since "iced tea" is constantly interpreted as "Hi C", a totally different beverage.

My personal understanding of this "Black English" is that it is an attempt to differentiate Blacks from Whites. As such, it is a racist undertaking, at the very least. "Black English" is just street language, and most of the people that I've met that speak it are, indeed, undereducated and underachievers. I live in a very racially balanced neighborhood, in a mostly poor area of my city. Believe me when I say that most of the people who speak this "language" are basically illiterate. And I'm not kidding.

That's sad. It's also unnecessary. There are other ways to respect and honor the African American culture other than the dumbing down of its people. Because in the end, that's what "Ebonics" is - a nod to the dumbing down of a people that need that like they need more discrimination and poverty.

Giving credence to this language does a great disservice to Black Americans. I applaud the efforts of any and all Black leaders who dissuade their people from adopting this "street English", which will do nothing but KEEP THEM DOWN. And if you think about it, it's just another form of slavery, because as long as people speak it, they will be denied access to the kinds of jobs and careers that will make them successful. Not everyone can be a Rap Star."

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SUBJECTIVITY RULES AT UC ADMISSIONS

By the same logic a medical student who is a great guy but who fails all his medical exams should be graduated

As students ponder their selection or rejection by University of California campuses, Patrick Hayashi is one of the people they could praise or blame. The Oakland resident is among a handful of people who have been instrumental in changing how the UC system reviews students. Even in retirement, he remains a potent force. Concerns he raised about the fairness of the prestigious National Merit Scholarship Program led to an announcement this month that UC campus chancellors are pulling university funding from the test-based program in 2006. ``Had he given up, this matter would not have received UC attention, perhaps ever,'' said UC-Santa Barbara education professor Michael T. Brown, who headed a faculty committee that also found problems with the program.

Hayashi has been a driving force behind the idea that each UC applicant should be evaluated as an individual. The post-affirmative action strategies he helped devise moved UC campuses away from selecting students based on grade-and-test-score formulas toward a broader, individualized review like those at elite private universities. ``He has had an extraordinary influence on how people get measured,'' said Tom Goldstein, a UC-Berkeley professor who has known Hayashi for 20 years. He did it, Goldstein said, by ``questioning the orthodoxies that went unquestioned for decades.''

Hayashi, 61, is a skilled political strategist. As the UC system's associate president, he worked with former UC President Richard Atkinson, a noted expert in testing and cognition, on a high-profile campaign that forced major revisions in the SAT I college entrance exam. ``It was a cooperative effort between us,'' Atkinson said. ``We laid out a plan for changes being implemented, but Pat really engineered this.''

Hayashi's family came to California in the 1880s. He was born in 1944 in Utah's Topaz internment camp and lived there a year. ``I remember nothing, but it affected my entire life,'' he said. The experience made him aware of racial issues and injustice, and their effect on whole generations. There were few early clues that Hayashi would become an activist. He played tennis at Hayward High School, and for a year at San Jose State College. Academically, he ranked dead center in his high school class. After graduating from UC-Berkeley in 1966 with an English degree, he worked at a variety of campus jobs while pursuing graduate education. He helped establish Berkeley's Asian-American studies program, but wasn't among the militant student strikers who called for an independent ethnic-studies college in the late '60s.

When Asian-American admissions to Berkeley dropped suddenly in 1984 after a period of rapid growth, some suspected the university of setting quotas. Hayashi was tapped to manage the public-relations crisis, which lasted several years during state and federal investigations. UC was never sanctioned. His skill dealing with the controversy ``saved my butt,'' said campus chancellor, I. Michael Heyman. ``I just didn't realize the intensity of the feeling.'' First as Heyman's executive assistant, then as associate vice chancellor of admissions, Hayashi lived on the front lines of UC-Berkeley's admissions wars of the 1980s and 1990s, attacked from all sides. He believed in ``throwing the net wide,'' Heyman said. He wanted ``admission standards that would bring in kids from non-traditional backgrounds who had a good chance of doing well, but had never had that opportunity.''

In 1996 Californians passed Proposition 209, which banned race as a factor in admissions. Hayashi introduced the concept of ``comprehensive review'' at Berkeley: reading each applicant's file, doing away with rigid scoring formulas and considering multiple factors in assessing potential. Its subjectivity, he said, is what made it good. ``Some students, you look at their history and put it all together and they're greater than the sum of their individual factors,'' he said. ``They're great kids. They've done great things with their lives by 17, and you know they will do great things after.''

Hayashi has a complex view of affirmative action as ``more than a numbers game,'' said UC-Berkeley professor Jack Citrin, who supported Proposition 209. He wanted to increase underrepresented minority students, ``but he also wanted Berkeley to remain an elite place from a conventional way of looking at things,'' Citrin said.

Hayashi retired last year but continues to battle the National Merit program, a symbol of academic achievement for almost 50 years. His main objection is what he calls ``a fake definition of merit'' based on its use of the PSAT as a gateway exam. The program uses cutoff scores that vary from state to state to eliminate about 99 percent of the test takers. ``You shouldn't make momentous decisions on insignificant differences in score,'' Hayashi said. ``Whites and Asians suffer most from the program,'' he explained. ``Millions of high-achieving students of all races, but especially whites and Asians, take the hardest courses their schools offer, concurrently enroll in community college and do extraordinarily well as president of the student body or mistress of the local youth symphony. But they just didn't get above a certain PSAT cutoff, so they are judged without merit.'' Hayashi hopes UC's decision will inspire other universities. If nothing else, he said, the debate demonstrates ``that traditional notions of merit have to be examined.''

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Teachers Need High Expectations Too!

But at the moment they only have to be dummies. Post lifted from Mz Smlph

Wow...I'm really on an education-rant roll lately. A few days ago, I posted about what makes a teacher "qualified" or not. While I didn't focus on teacher education, I do believe that a teacher needs some sort of training before becoming certified, whether it be a formal four-year program or an alternative licensure kind of deal. The state in which I currently teach agrees with me (smart) and graciously offers financial assistance to those who come into teaching from another field and are seeking licensure.

I am happy to say that, as of last Monday, I am done with all my licensure courses and will start teaching in the fall with a complete Lateral Entry license. You might think that it was difficult for me to reach this point, and part of me wishes that it had been. I might be a better teacher if I had actually been challenged in this process.

Coming into teaching, I wasn't required to take many classes, thanks to the similarities between the Psychology and Education curricula at my university. Then, as I demonstrated "success" in the classroom, licensure requirements such as "Classroom Management" were fulfilled, further reducing the number of actual courses I needed to take. Passing the Praxis, which was frighteningly easy, meant that literature and grammar courses were also waived. By the time all these waivers were taken into account, I needed only two courses to be granted licensure.

The first course I took, during my initial semester as a teacher, was called "Technologies in Education." I took it as an on-line course since the actual university, if you can call it that, was 1.5 hours from my home. I knew right away that I was in for an interesting experience when my instructor sent out her "Curriculum Vitae." In my primary perusal of this document, I noted no fewer than 5 fairly glaring errors. As if this were not reason enough to doubt her professionalism, I then started reading the announcements she sent to our class via the university's Internet distance learning system (Blackboard). She was extremely critical and harsh, reprimanding the entire class for "not reading the syllabus" whenever one person asked a question. She never taught directly and never contributed to the discussion board conversations we were required to have. While we did have a textbook (a $75.00 paperback), we didn't really have to read it. Weekly quizzes came from the textbook's website, and my classmates and I quickly figured out that, by using the browser's back button, one could get answers for and resubmit the quizzes endlessly without losing points. To the teacher's credit, there was a final project: a portfolio that consisted of various projects we were supposed to complete over the course of the semester. I did my entire portfolio on Thanksgiving Day. I think I had to design a web page, create a spreadsheet, and make a PowerPoint. It was rough, grueling almost, but boy, did it make me a better teacher!! (*clears throat*)

When it came time for me to start my second and last certification-required course, Reading in the Content Areas, there was only one "university" offering the class. This "university" is one that I have long suspected to be a REALLY CRAPPY school. (Unfortunately, several of the teachers I mentioned in that last post got their degrees there.) From the day my colleague and I drove to the campus for orientation, I knew my suspicions had been confirmed and not in any sort of self-fulfilling prophecy kinda' way.

The instructor of this course, which was also on-line, was a kindergarten teacher who had never taught the course before. She used the same assignments as the teacher before her, sometimes not even bothering to change the dates from the previous semester. Unlike the instructor from my first course, she wasn't rude to us, but this was probably because she almost NEVER communicated with us at all. We had weekly assignments, due on Fridays, that consisted of regurgitating information from the textbook. The on-line grade-book we could access showed that, week after week, the class average on these assignments was 100%. Clearly, if the instructor was reading our responses at all, she was not holding us to very high standards.

I was out of town when the short answer, open-book midterm was posted and freaked out when I realized I had left my book at home. Over the phone, THE GREATEST ROOMMATE EVER kindly gave me some key points from the text. I put in about 30 minutes of work and scored a, you guessed it, 100%.

Going into the final, I still had 100% in the class. When I heard that, like the midterm, this exam would be open-book, I was confident that I could do fairly well. When the instructor told us it would consist of 25 multiple choice questions (this was the FINAL, people!), I became even more sure of myself. Then...I saw the test. Many of the questions contained obvious typos. Some of the questions had vaguely tricky answers, like this one:

Why should teachers allow students time to think?

a. Being given more time makes students think.
b. being given more time enables students to answer questions better.
c. It is the polite thing to do.
d. It ensures quick answers.

I was a little torn between a and b. Eventually, I chose b because nothing, not wait-time, not a miracle can MAKE anyone do anything. Tricky questions like these aren't the type of trick questions that I can respect. Rather, they're the type that requires the test-taker to attempt to guess what the test-writer might have been thinking. Of course, I will never understand what my instructor was thinking with this next question:

What educational practices contribute to the students diversity in secondary classrooms?

a.More students entering school from poverty-level homes
b.Immigration
c.Cultural change
d. All of the above

Since when are immigration, cultural change, and poverty EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES????? I chose d because a,b, and c all contribute to diversity, but I hated myself for even having to answer it.

So, I did my best to answer 25 questions like these. I was quite chagrined when, upon submitting my answers, I learned that I missed 5, scoring only an 80%. How depressing!! I was only slightly comforted by the fact that the class average on the exam was only 72%.

The fact that this class was required for certification bothers me for a couple reasons. First of all, the state must think it's an important class if you can't get a teaching certificate without taking it. I feel I was cheated out of a class that was supposed to have taught me something I need to know. I can honestly say that I learned nothing from that class. Is this partially my fault? Sure, I could have taken the initiative to read the text book on my own, create challenging assignments for myself, and regularly assess my own progress by means of varied and authentic assessments, but who are we kidding here? It's summer. Would I have done these things if they were a requirement for the class? Of course I would have. It's all about high expectations. Teachers need them as much as students do.

The other thing that really gets my goat about this class is that, clearly, the instructor had NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS DOING!!! Immigration is not an educational practice, dam*it! I have always been of the opinion that, if someone is going to be my instructor, get up in front of me and lecture - or "teach" me over the Internet - that instructor SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT SHE'S TEACHING!!! Does this woman have a single shred of a conscience? Did she not feel bad that she was collecting a paycheck for teaching us nothing? (Sounds a lot like some teachers at my school.)

Granted, I paid only $58.00 for the course (+ $90.00 for the crappy book), but the State of ** footed the rest of the bill. I know, I should be happy that the course was so easy, that I can now start teaching in a few weeks with a fully cleared license. But something inside me continues to rage against this kind of non-education. It's insulting, and I don't like being the victim of it.






THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Whenever he can, President Bush touts the huge spending increases necessary to promote his No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But it's not just NCLB funding that has increased: the entire education budget has ballooned during the president's time in office. The Department of Education's budget has grown by 82.5 percent in real terms from $34.9 billion in FY2001 to $63.7 billion in FY2005. This is the largest increase of any president since Lyndon Johnson. And President Bush's 2006 budget asks for more of the same. Every state sees an increase in grant money, nearly 5 percent on average. The average state receives a level of grant funding that is more than 50 percent higher than when President Bush took office; no state has an increase less than 35 percent.

In spite of the GOP's extravagance, Democrats constantly criticize the Administration for not spending enough. During the presidential campaign, Kerry told voters that the President was not serious about education and promised that, if elected, he would spend an additional $27 billion. Special interest groups are also dissatisfied with the amount of money going to education. In April, the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education charging that the federal government hasn't provided enough money for states to comply with the NCLB. This is bad news for fiscal conservatives: the Bush administration may use this opportunity to brag about how much they have increased federal education spending and may be required to spend even more....

This is unfortunate. The only real measure of success is not how much we are spending but whether we are getting the most bang for our bucks. American schools are already very well-funded. Moreover, there is little evidence that additional funding would much improve the quality of education. In international comparisons of per-pupil expenditures, the U.S. ranks near the top of the list. According to OECD figures, the U.S. spends 78 percent more per primary school student than Germany, 58 percent more than France, 31 percent more than Japan, and 71 percent more than the U.K. But despite these large spending differentials, American students perform no better than average on international comparisons of math and reading skills.

Comparisons over time reveal a similar story. From 1960 to 2000, inflation-adjusted spending on education in the U.S. nearly tripled, yet test scores show little improvement, dropout rates are high, and a large racial achievement gap persists.

Education economist Caroline Hoxby explains that public schools today are doing less with more: school productivity -- achievement per dollar spent -- declined by 55 to 73 percent from 1971 to 1999. Meanwhile, private and charter schools are boosting student achievement with lower expenditures per pupil than public schools. In other words, there is no consistent, systematic relationship between education spending and student outcomes.

Trumpeting huge increases in education spending may lower the level of complaining from the NEA and other critics of President Bush's education policies, but "historic" new federal spending is nothing for a fiscal conservative to brag about. And given the weak effectiveness of money to improve education, it's nothing for an education reformer to boast about either. The Bush administration has taken the GOP from advocating no federal spending on education to spending like drunken sailors. It's high time for the party to sober up and remember its core principles.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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