Corrected and expanded at 4:12 a.m., on Saturday, August 14, 2010.
Revised at 5:17 a.m., on Saturday, August 14, 2010.
Last revised at 5:35 a.m., on Saturday, August 14, 2010.
Florida State Senator Frederica Wilson at the press conference where she called for repealing the FCAT law.“St. Sen. Frederica Wilson Wants FCAT Law Repealed,” by Lisa Cilli and Tiffani Helberg, CBS Miami, August 11, 2010.
[State] Sen. Wilson says she wants the FCAT [Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test] law to be repealed because it’s pushing Florida’s children to a life of crime and destitution.
Surrounded by dozens of leaders from the African-American community and the Miami-Dade County school system, Wilson condemned the test. She echoed the cries of superintendents across the state and called the FCAT system flawed and also said the company that administers the test is responsible for a host of problems….
Sen. Wilson says she believes the FCAT is particularly affecting African-American children. She says all too many of them go to school, get a passing grade, yet cannot pass the FCAT and are kept out of the 9th grade. It’s a situation that she says fosters a downward spiral for too many children.
“So they take drugs to numb their pain. And after they take drugs, they’re in the fuzz, they don’t even know where they are. They join a gang, they pick up an AK-47, they sell drugs, they turn to crime, they’re jobless, they’re fearless, and they’re godless,” said Sen. Wilson.
Wilson argues that millions of dollars that the state spends on FCAT testing could be better spent on other things such as vocational training [NS: her one good idea!], drop out retention programs, books, supplies and more.
The FCAT is used to monitor students’ progress and schools’ compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind act . Third graders must pass the reading test to be advanced to fourth grade, while high school students must pass the 10th grade reading and math tests to receive a standard diploma.
State Senator Frederica Wilson is running for the Congressional District 17 seat…
Her opponents include … her ex-husband Phillip Brutus, a lawyer and former state legislator.
And here I thought that blacks only variously got hooked on drugs and/or landed in jail due to the predations of racist, white drug dealers and cops.
My reader Thrasymachus responded to the original version of this piece,
“In reality she has a point. Our one-size-fits-all educational system, with its assumption everyone can and should be taught to the same level, is a waste of time for minorities if there is no objective standard and humiliating if there is.”
Actually, Thrasymachus has a point; Sen. Wilson does not. (Thrasymachus is reading her in white terms; I am reading her in black.) While I heartily support more vocational programs and less academics for students who lack academic aptitude, which students are the majority of school-aged blacks and Hispanics, Sen. Wilson supports social promotion. She demands that the students whom she claims to champion, who lack academic aptitude, be promoted from grade to grade, even though they can’t do the work, and be graduated from high school. People who make such demands always demand as well that such specimens be accepted to and graduated from college, and given well-paid, lifetime, civil service sinecures. (In the place of qualified whites and Asians.)
The only way you could select out non-academic kids, and move them from an academic to a vocational track, would be through standardized testing. Sen. Wilson’s opposition to standardized testing tells me that she is just paying lip-service to vocationalism.
Sen. Wilson’s support for more money for “drop out retention programs” is another red flag. Such programs are, at best, boondoggles meant to create show-no jobs for yet more black and Hispanic affirmative action hires. At worst, they encourage thugs who, in an saner (“racist!”), earlier time would have been expelled, to stay in school, where they destroy competent teachers' ability to teach, and other students’ ability to learn, causing many teachers to quit, and many students to dropout.
As for books and supplies, the typical black-dominated school already gets as much as two-and-a-half times as much money (p. 12) for such things than its typical, white-dominated counterpart. The problem is while white educators typically put their budget into the school, black “educators” typically put it in their pockets.
As I wrote in the scholarly journal Academic Questions in 1998, “social promotion” is part of a package deal (school-college-lifetime employment) for blacks and Hispanics who display neither talent nor a work ethic, and that package has been a pillar of affirmative action-diversity since the 1960s.
Another of my readers, Californian, observed,
Wait a minute: if there is no such thing as “race,” how then can black children be affected by these tests any differently than the children of other “races?”
Still, there is no denying that No Child Left Behind has been something of a disaster on the education front. All the more interesting because it was pushed through by the Republican W. Bush administration. Apparently, federalizing education is ok with the GOP as long as it is the product of their man in the White house.
To which I respond, Californian, stop being so logical! Don’t you know that logic is “racist”!
As for NCLB, well, yes. No small-government Republican has inhabited the White House since quiet Cal Coolidge left in 1928.
And Anonymous opined,
Ha ha. If passing a standardized test changed one's character somehow and made it impossible to do drugs, shoot your friends, dress like the Three Stooges, join gangs, wander out into traffic, spout illiterate, boring cliches at the top of your lungs and listen to/create violent/obscene jump rope rhymes, Blacks would suddenly refuse to even take such a test. They would lose their reason to live.
To which I say, Well, yes. But how else is one to show that one is authentically black?
I have changed the title of this blog, dropping the original title’s final section, “…and Don’t You Dare Vote for My Evil Ex-Husband, Who’s Running Against Me for Congress!,” because it was based on what I have since determined was a grammatical error in the CBS Miami report. Upon further research, I have determined that congressional candidate Phillip Brutus is the ex-husband not of rival candidate, state Senator Frederica Wilson, but of a different rival candidate, state Rep. Yolly Roberson.
The CBS report’s final paragraph reads, in its entirety,
“Her opponents include Miami Gardens Mayor Shirley Gibson; Rudolph Moise, a physician; Marleine Bastien, executive director of the Haitian Women of Miami; state Rep. James Bush III; North Miami Councilman Scott Galvin; Miami Gardens Councilman Andre Williams; state Rep. Yolly Roberson, who is a lawyer and nurse; and her ex-husband Phillip Brutus, a lawyer and former state legislator.”
A word to primary reporter Lisa Cilli, and whoever at CBS’ Miami affiliate was responsible for editing the story in question: You described Phillip Brutus as State Senator Frederica Wilson’s ex-husband. Saying “Her opponents…,” with Wilson as the subject, followed by a series set off by semi-colons, followed by “and her ex-husband Phillip Brutus, a lawyer and former state legislator,” means that Brutus and Wilson were once married. In such a sentence, you can’t suddenly switch subjects. One option to write the sentence correctly would have been, “state Rep. Yolly Roberson, who is a lawyer and nurse; and Roberson’s ex-husband Phillip Brutus, a lawyer and former state legislator.”
Avoiding such misunderstandings is one of the many reasons why things like grammar and syntax, so maligned by multiculturalists, are so important.
A tip ‘o the hat to American Renaissance.
Please check out my new fundraising letter, which includes celebrity endorsements from Mark Potok of the SPLC, and black supremacist, the Rev. Damon Lynch III!
In reality she has a point. Our one-size-fits-all educational system, with its assumption everyone can and should be taught to the same level, is a waste of time for minorities if there is no objective standard and humiliating if there is.
ReplyDeleteThis comment was great:
ReplyDelete"celebrity endorsements from Mark Potok of the SPLC, and black supremacist, the Rev. Damon Lynch III!"
I needed a good laugh, thanks.
Ha ha. If passing a standardized test changed one's character somehow and made it impossible to do drugs, shoot your friends, dress like the Three Stooges, join gangs, wander out into traffic, spout illiterate, boring cliches at the top of your lungs and listen to/create violent/obscene jump rope rhymes, Blacks would suddenly refuse to even take such a test. They would lose their reason to live.
ReplyDeleteWait a minute: if there is no such thing as "race," how then can black children be affected by these tests any differently than the children of other "races?"
ReplyDeleteStill, there is no denying that No Child Left Behind has been something of a disaster on the education front. All the more interesting because it was pushed through by the Republican W. Bush administration. Apparently, federalizing education is ok with the GOP as long as it is the product of their man in the White house.