Historically black schools say Obama’s policies have fallen short

The country’s first African American president is finding himself increasingly at odds with a cornerstone of the African American community: historically black colleges and universities.

 

(The Washington Post)

Leaders at these schools and some black lawmakers say the Obama administration has been pushing policies for years that hurt students at a time when historically black colleges are already cash-strapped and seeing a drop in enrollment.

Tensions spilled over after a recent Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Obama and Vice President Biden in which the president said that historically black schools, also known as HBCUs, needed to do a better job graduating students and not saddling them with debt, according to several people at the meeting. Some Black Caucus members bristled at those remarks since they say the president didn’t acknowledge that his own administration was also pursuing policies that advocates say are hurting the schools.

Read the full article HERE.

Chanda Chisala – Closing the Black-White IQ Gap Debate, Part 3

Thomas Sowell vs. Richard Lynn

“It should be noted that a study of black and white Americans is not a study of Negro and Caucasian races in any global sense.” – Thomas Sowell, 1978 (Essays and Data on American Ethnic groups, p. 206).

I will now respond to some hereditarian scholars who wrote some articles in response to my data and arguments on the Black-White IQ Gap (Fuerst, Frost and Thompson). I hope to cover every valid concern brought up so far, including technical issues on data reliability, etc. I will also address some of the alternative explanations that have been suggested for our ethnic data that shows much higher than expected academic performance of Black immigrant children in Western countries, which I have presented as a refutation of the racial genetic hypothesis for Black-White test score differences.
FIRST, FUERST

Hereditarian scholar, John “Chuck” Fuerst, has written a lengthy piece responding to my last article, in which he offers to give us a tutorial on how to do rigorous research (like himself!). That’s certainly kind of him. So, in the collegial spirit of academic exchange, I will also present this article as a tutorial on how to employ rigorous common sense in research. This might save us from the endless need to pursue a lot of superfluous data before making intelligent judgments, especially on investigations where perfect data is sparsely available.

The data we have from both the US and the UK concerning school performance of children from different ethnicities is certainly not perfect, but it is more than sufficient when you bring some common sense to the task. For example, we know that under a genetic hypothesis it is extremely unlikely that an African ethnic group could have a high school pass rate that is much higher than the white pass rate or, even more improbable, equal to or higher than the Chinese pass rate, so we can rightly be skeptical about a 2007 report that suggests that a certain Nigerian tribe has accomplished this in the UK. But when we also see another verified report saying that that same tribe has at times produced the top student in the UK, beating every white or Chinese student, common sense should tempt us to reconsider our skepticism in that first report, even if it was only in Powerpoint format!

Read the full article HERE.

How did this Chicago charter school achieve the best college-enrollment figures in the city?

Seong-Ah Cho

 

 

(via The Atlantic)

What’s most notable about the Chicago kindergarten class where assistant teacher Nichelle Bell is temporarily in charge is what is not happening. Teachers are not redirecting their pupils, who are not off-task. Hands are not in other people’s spaces. Voices—those of children and adults—are not raised.

According to conventional wisdom, there should be bedlam in the classroom here at this charter school operated by the University of Chicago. The teacher of record is on maternity leave and her replacement has stepped out to attend to a student with a serious medical issue. That’s left Bell and a paraprofessional overseeing reading instruction—arguably the most important period of the day—for the other 33 students at this high-poverty school.

One boy in a small group working on a whiteboard can’t hold still between his turns. While other kids are at the board, he marches up and down the rug at the front of the room. But when it’s his turn again, his focus is intense.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/thriving-in-the-heart-of-chicago/394679/?utm_source=SFTwitter

Howard Fuller ―School choice and the liberation of low-income families

Education reform: For Marquette professor Howard Fuller, it's not about test scores, it's about liberation and freedom. But Fuller argues that the ed reform movement has three requirements for success: Low-income families need school choices, the schools they choose among must be high quality, and the reform movement must be led by the people it's trying to liberate.

 

Chelsi P. Henry — School Choice Empowers Students of Color

via The Root:

This week marks National School Choice Week: Communities across the nation are celebrating the successes of school choice, voucher programs, tax-credit scholarships and charter schools. Unfortunately, over the past six years, the Obama administration, Democrats and teachers unions have fought against parents’ right to choose the best education for their child. This, even as 52 percent of Congressional Black Caucus members have, at one time or another, sent their children to private schools.

Which begs the question: How is it that students of color—particularly black students—have a 68 percent graduation rate, versus 85 percent for white students, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education? The statistics say to me that education is the civil rights issue of my generation.

Read complete article here

Our Voices Will Be Heard: Tauana Goins

Hear Tauana Goins' story. Tauana is one of the nine brave parents who has chosen to make their voices heard by participating as plaintiffs challenging teacher dismissal laws in New York State.

 

Four reasons to be skeptical about Obama’s free community college proposal

The American Enterprise Institute

The plan has many forebears. Obama clearly took some inspiration from the Tennessee Promise, a program started by Republican Governor Bill Haslam that provides tuition-free community college to any Tennessee 12th grader who wants it. (We don’t yet know a thing about whether the program has helped students who would not have finished college otherwise.) Other voices have called for a federally-funded “public option” for higher ed. University of Wisconsin professor Sara Goldrick-Rab, proposed a free two-year option last spring. Before that, the American Federation of Teachers’ Robert Samuels published a book on the subject. What to make of it? I’ve written about the pitfalls to the free college idea a few times (see here, here, and the conclusion to Reinventing Financial Aid). To summarize some of the main ideas:

Read complete article here

Andrew Mwenda ― Inside Africa’s major contradiction

Why African elites sound angry and frustrated though continent’s economies grow faster than rest of the world

Andrew Mwenda is a Ugandan journalist, founder and owner of The Independent

Over the last decade and a half, Sub Sahara African economies have been growing fast and creating prosperity for many. Today, our continent is exporting and importing more and our governments, investors, and consumers are spending in per capita terms. Yet many African elites, especially the chattering classes on social media, sound angrier and frustrated.

This is partly because growth and the accompanying increase in personal incomes, comes with rapid urbanisation and expansion of education.

As I have written in this column before, urbanisation and education are liberating influences. They expose people to the world, expand their horizons, and grow their ambitions.   The effects of growth, therefore, are first felt in cities and among the educated. Cities offer opportunities for trade, jobs, and a good life. This pulls more people to partake of the opportunities. However, the rate at which people migrate to cities is always faster than the rate at which the economy creates opportunities.

The initial resulting mismatch between growth in aspirations and growth in available opportunities creates social frustration.

Read complete article here

CHAVOUS: An Open Letter to Black Elected Officials

Kevin P. Chavous, an attorney, author, national education reform leader, and former Democratic Party politician in Washington, D.C., makes the case for school choice and charter schools. 

Each year, various social service organizations issue reports relating to the state of black America. While issues such as affordable housing, jobs, crime and challenging family dynamics are generally discussed, the poor quality of the education received by far too many African-American children continues to be a focal point found in these reports. The facts don't lie. According to John Hopkins University, 32 percent of African-American students drop out of high school nationally — 15 percentage points higher than their white counterparts. In urban school districts with a high concentration of low-income and minority students, the gap is widened and graduation rates are even lower. 

According to the Schott Report on Black Males in Public Education, African-American males have the lowest graduation rates out of any other race in 38 of our nation’s 50 states, a 76 percent majority. For over a decade, African-American students have been the least likely to obtain a high school diploma out of every racial or ethnic group in the United States. Additionally, the achievement gap between African-American and white students has consistently grown or stayed stagnant nationally with white students outperforming their African-American peers by up to 30 points on standardized tests. Not only are African-American students struggling in high school, but they are ill prepared to succeed in higher education. Nearly 63 percent of African-American students enrolled in a full-time, four-year college institution fail to graduate.

Read complete article here