11/11/2011
WP “reporter” Kevin Sieff:
In nearly every local system, white students are disproportionately represented, even though most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.[Washington-area schools confront the ‘gifted gap’ by Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, November 6, 2011.]
That’s a bald-faced lie.
This isn’t a report, it’s a racist reportorial, full of racial code phrases, supporting the elimination of gifted programs.
Sieff: Experts say one factor that skews enrollment in gifted classes is intelligence testing.Students living in poverty, particularly those whose parents are uneducated or speak English as a second language, are less likely to develop verbal skills measured by traditional [read: valid] intelligence tests. But that doesn’t mean they’re not gifted. Assessments that measure spatial and mathematical intelligence as well as curiosity and leadership abilities are more likely to identify a diverse crop of gifted students, experts say.
Those aren’t “experts,” they’re test-bashing Marxists, and black and Hispanic supremacists. Because traditional intelligence tests are abstract, they contain as little cultural bias as possible. “Curiosity” and “leadership abilities” are subjective terms that are easily politically corrupted, and are code phrases for ‘utterly unqualified black or Hispanic applicant we’re letting in through affirmative action.’ Indeed, “leadership abilities” was already an established racial code term used by crooked college admissions officers that came up in the New York Times’ Jacques Steinberg’s reports 10 years ago that became his 2002 book, The Gatekeepers.
Sieff: Among them [assessments], they say, are testing and outreach methods that fail to ensure children from all backgrounds get an equal shot.
Paging George Orwell! What Sieff and his comrades really mean is that the programs are still somewhat merit-based, and that Sieff & Co. aim to gut them, in favor of a dumbed-down, racial and ethnic spoils system.
“In many ways, the district has been resegregated,” Superintendent Morton Sherman said.
Sieff repeatedly identifies meritocracy with “segregation,” in order to make the former appear repellently racist. He doesn’t quote a single “educator” or civilian who supports meritocracy, without which there can be no gifted program. You will also search in vain in his work for condemnation of school segregation achieved through violently terrorizing white school children, educators, and staffers.
Sieff: Intelligence tests have been tweaked.
Read: Corrupted.
Sieff: The Fairfax County system and others in Northern Virginia have started an enrichment program that targets high-achieving minority students.
“Enrichment programs” are for mediocre students; not only do “high-achieving students” not need them, but such programs are harmful to gifted students. The programs are insufficiently challenging, and often entail additional hours of schooling for kids who have already left everything in the classroom during the normal school day, and need a break from schooling. Such “enrichment programs” are often geared towards black students, and are based on the influential but baseless notion that bombarding ordinary or low-achieving black kids with more schooling will transform them into rocket scientists. It’s never happened, and it never will. But it will turn many kids against school, and anger them when, short of cheating, they fail to see the promised improvements.
Such programs are also disguised methods for pickpocketing predominantly white tax bases.
I have personal experience with “enrichment programs,” from when my son, then in kindergarten, was forced to attend one after school for 38 minutes, Monday through Thursday. In a couple of months, he went from loving school to becoming irritable and starting to hate it. Then his teacher informed me that he had tested over one year above grade level, and didn’t need the program. Over the school’s resistance — it got paid per head for every kid subjected to the “enrichment” each day — I wrote an administrator that my son was finished with the program, effective immediately.
Sieff: Among local school systems, Prince William County’s has taken perhaps the most aggressive policy on diversity in gifted classes. It mandates that the demographic composition of the gifted program reflect the overall racial and ethnic makeup of the school system. To do that, Prince William has amended its identification process to ensure that it finds gifted students from a variety of backgrounds.
That’s a dumbed-down, racial and ethnic quota system rigged to admit mediocre black and Hispanic kids, and deliberately excluding gifted white and Asian kids, i.e., the opposite of a merit-based gifted program. Not only is it racist, but it violates federal civil rights law, and is unconstitutional, in the bargain.
Sieff: Fairfax’s “Young Scholars” program aims to find underrepresented minorities and get them into gifted classes. Some parents have voiced opposition to that initiative, claiming it shouldn’t restrict such services to a narrow population when thousands of students countywide might benefit from them. Still, Fairfax’s gifted program is overwhelmingly white and Asian.
This is designed to both confuse readers, and to make Sieff’s radically anti-merit position sound moderate.
While Sieff says nothing about hiring practices, his fellow Post political operative, Christy Goodman, launched a salvo to racially cleanse well-to-do Alexandria’s public schools of white teachers last year. The powers of diversity had already succeeded at chasing so many white kids out of the city’s public schools that, in a city that is 56.2 percent white, only 25 percent of its school kids are white.
In the racial socialist playbook, after blacks have achieved some success in racially cleansing white kids from the public schools, the next step is doing the same thing to white teachers and administrators.
If Sieff and his comrades succeed at reducing gifted programs to a racial and ethnic quota system, they will demand the same of their staffing, which will mean radically incompetent black and Hispanic teachers, staffers, and administrators.
Since typical classes in most integrated public schools are radically dumbed down, gifted programs and magnet schools are the only thing keeping middle-class white and Asian kids in the public schools, because otherwise they will be robbed of a quality education, and their parents won’t stand for it. If Kevin Sieff and his comrades get their wish, they will run middle-class and even many working-class white and Asian families out of the public schools, turning those schools into racist black and Hispanic ghettoes. But what do Washington Post reporters and editors care about the public schools?
They don’t send their own kids to them!
P.S., Friday, November 11, 2011, 5:55 a.m.: Another affirmative action code word is “intellectual vitality.” Since under racial socialism real “intellectual vitality” spells social death, the phrase is an Orwellian exercise referring to intellectual conformity, combined with membership in an unconstitutionally protected group.
Other such code words include “holistic” admissions rubrics, and the claim that students are sought who can apply ideas to everyday life, as if being on the slow side gave one the ability not only to understand an idea, but to better derive its practical applications to problems, than high-IQ students. (By that “logic,” we need to accept more applicants to engineering programs who are lousy at math.)
Note, too, the observation of a reader at the American Renaissance Web site:
20 — Detroit WASP wrote at 8:17 PM on November 7:If there is no such thing as race, why are the measuring achievement by RACE? Oh, that’s right, when they bring up race, it is okay, when I do, I am a racist. I always forget that part !!!!!
As “Detroit WASP” suggests, far from denying the reality of race, leftists violently deny or fanatically embrace race, based on expediency, because they actually believe in nothing.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.