Counter-Currents
Diane Ravitch
The Death and Life of the Great American School System:
How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education
New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010
Ask almost anyone about the state of education in the United States (or even more broadly across Western countries) and they will express concern over low test scores, students being unprepared for college and the workplace, and a lack of civil and cultural knowledge.
Subscribe here to keep reading
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
Related
-
Thug – Or a Million Murders
-
Society vs. the Market: Alain de Benoist’s Case Against Liberalism
-
Critical Pedagogy
-
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
-
What Minds What We Matter? Part 2
-
What minds what we matter?
-
Anyone at home? House of Leaves 25
-
A White Nationalist Novel from 1902 Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots
10 comments
Though many would consider me as a person who achieved middle-class “success”, for the past few years (perhaps indicative of a mid-life crisis), few days have gone by in which I have not experienced anger of varying degrees for having attended widely socioeconomically, racially, and ethnically diverse middle and high schools. I briefly touched upon the experience in a previous post in the comments for Devlin’s article “Not Hooking Up”, but I think I might have violated some posting rules (and I apologize for that). Barring broken homes and child abuse, I cannot think of another way to screw up a person’s trajectory, mental health, and social status than attendance in such a school.
I agree. The schools should be desegregated by race. The 1954 SCOTUS decision to outlaw racial segregation was a fatal blunder and an abuse of power. It started the process of destruction of US education.
Before 1954, our public schools were the best. Today, they are totally dysfunctional, hugely expensive, and serve no useful purpose.
Yes. I come from one of the most ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse areas of the country. I also think having students, specifically high school students, of different economic backgrounds, in the same school is a bad idea also, primarily because of the resentment and envy that’s created by such. However, that can be just my own personal experience, having attended schools with people of low-brow, status-mongering, mean character of all classes. Also, as I wrote about elsewhere, boomer parents in the latchkey-kid era of the 90s generally did not give a damn about what went on with their children, regardless of class.
Strangely, after writing an entire book about how moving students between schools and teachers resulted in inconsequential changes to the test results of students, three years later, in Reign of Error, her follow-up book responding to criticism that she presented no plan for improvement and merely attacked proposed reforms, Ravitch wrote, “the root causes of poor academic performance are segregation and poverty.”
“Strangely”? Not at all. It sounds as if her first book was nothing more than a welcome mat/life support system for the more important (to her) second book. It’s what they do.
It’s not strange at all. Intelligent normies like Ravitch often come right up to the precipice:
“It seems that the only guaranteed strategy [to improve test scores] is to change the student population, replacing low-performing students with higher-performing students.”
They peer over the edge, and see the race-realism beckoning them from below, so they scurry back onto ground where they feel more secure: culture. It’s the teachers, it’s the family structure, it’s segregation, yadda yadda. Press them a little on the relationship between culture and genetics, that genetics influence culture and that culture is the man-made part of the environment that influences genetics. At that point, they may shut down, or grow angry. Or maybe make some conversation-ending claim that “Evolution doesn’t work like that.” If they’re really sharp, they’ll use the SJ Gould argument that man stopped evolving roughly 10,000 years ago. Hit them with the Cochran and Harpending perspective that evolution increases with civilization. Then they really shut down or get emotional. Anything but submitting to the awful truth staring up at them from the abyss.
The answer to the conundrum is staring them right in the face. I figure a lot of them know the score, and the rest suffer from tremendous cognitive dissonance. Either way, they can’t cross PC lines if they expect to get published rather than cancelled.
As for evolution, it’s very much in effect – the problem is that we need to get it out of reverse gear!
There have been many studies over the past 50 years proving that there is no “closing the academic gap” between the races. Way back in 1998, Kansas City proved that no amount of money under the sun could fix Black under-achievement.
MONEY AND SCHOOL PERFORMANCE by Paul Ciotti
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-298.pdf
About 5 years ago, Vincent James’ staff, at Daily Veracity wrote an article How to Keep Your Red State Red and Keep Blue State Refugees Out. In it, he shared HUD & other federal statistical data, uncovered by the Obama Admin, showing that Blacks moving into White neighborhoods & attending White schools, in fact, did worse than when they were in ‘inner-city” schools. They had worse results after graduating high school, they became even more dependent on government assistance, AND… the White neighborhoods suffered increased crime and lower property values, from which they never recovered.
There’s nothing wrong with standardized tests per se, but it’s wrong to test only a few subjects and reorient school around those few subjects. Standardized testing is the best tool to compare students across classrooms, schools, states, and countries. It’s bad to punish schools for their test scores when the actual cause is demographic, but that’s not the tests’ fault; it’s the fault of people who can’t accept that the races differ.
School choice is necessary in today’s environment where most schools are centers of leftist indoctrination and/or third-world hell holes. The local public school is only 10% white – maybe even less now – and most students are illiterate. Almost half can’t speak English. Of course I want the choice not to send my daughters there!
If we had a homogeneous country, then we wouldn’t have these problems, for the most part.
Standardized testing has always been there with the CAT tests and Iowa basic skills, et al., depending what part of the country you are in, but it was never a metric for funding. The whole concept is a sort of bad faith strategy of promoting education but in reality stressing inegalitarianism.
Since Covid era, Asian performance has surged upward, while white performance has gone way down. We don’t hear anything about this discrepancy. It seems the oligarchs are happy that black and white are becoming “equal”, even if the means to that end is lowering white performance! Of course, all of this is spite based.
There doesn’t seem to be much discussion anywhere about students’ aptitudes. As far as I can tell, hardly any student is equally brilliant in all subjects or broad general areas. No, we don’t all have the same potential for everything. If only some areas are tested for, and not others, that is going to seriously skew our ideas of intelligence where students are concerned.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.