If the KKK Came Up With This...

If the KKK Came Up With This...

We would be appropriately furious at the combination of gutting of important classes and the presumption that only white kids are smart enough to take science classes. But progressive sorts are doing it to help blacks and Hispanics. Eric over at Classical Values pointed to this article from the December 23, 2009 East Bay Express about Berkeley High School idiocy:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

There's more commentary at Classical Values.

Oh yes, here's another one of those progressive proposals that essentially says that progressives believe minorities are too stupid to compete with whites. From the January 6, 2010 Chicago Sun-Times:

The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.

Ya think? I'm reminded of the results when Washington D.C.'s police department decided that requiring cadets to pass their final exams was racist, so they stopped requiring that--and produced a lot of cops who could not produce police reports useful for prosecuting crimes.

And this January 5, 2010 Denver Post article just frosts me:

Black public-school students in Colorado are nearly three times as likely to face serious discipline as their white peers, a disparity that is persistently growing despite efforts to curb it.

In the 2008-09 school year, about 70,000, or 8.5 percent, of the state's 818,000 students were suspended, expelled or disciplined for being disruptive, according to a Denver Post analysis of newly released data. Reasons ranged from drug, weapon and alcohol infractions to disobedient and detrimental behavior, the most common — and subjective — reasons.

But while black students make up just 5.9 percent of the student population, they were the subject of 12.7 percent of the discipline cases, up from 11.7 percent five years ago. White students, who were about 61 percent of the population, were the subject of 46.8 percent of discipline cases.

Latino students make up 28.4 percent of the population and were involved in 37 percent of discipline cases, another persistent gap.

Expressed as a rate, 18 of every 100 black students and 11 of 100 Latino students faced serious discipline, compared with 6.5 out of 100 white students and 8.5 of 100 students overall.

In the Colorado Springs 11 district, 31 percent of black students were suspended, expelled or disciplined last year. The district's student population is 11 percent black.

"It's discouraging," said Mike Poore, deputy superintendent for the Colorado Springs 11 school district.

"On expulsion, suspension, achievement, we have not closed the gap. We should be called out for that, I guess. We're working hard to make changes."

Look, if this disparity is because black students are being picked on by teachers and administrators, then there's something that the schools need to do. However, I find it almost impossible to believe that in a leftist controlled profession like teaching that these disparities are because of racist teachers and administrators. Blacks are about 3.5x as likely to commit murder as non-Hispanic whites--but that's not because the police ignore murders by whites. It's because blacks commit murder at vastly higher rates than non-Hispanic whites. It would be startling indeed if whatever causes these disparities in murder rates doesn't affect school misbehavior rates as well.