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Educational proficiency for black students ‘far lower’ than expected


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Washington Examiner:

Educational proficiency for black students ‘far lower’ than expected
By: MARK HEMINGWAY
Commentary Staff Writer
11/09/10 12:15 PM EST
A depressing report this morning on new educational data from the New York Times:

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.

But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

A couple of thoughts about this:

Even though proficiency standards for white students is much higher, it’s still abysmal.
Words can’t express how appalling it is that this racial achievement gap exists, and it needs to be on every American’s radar screen. Fixing our education system needs to be a much bigger part of our local and national political discussions.snip
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Words can’t express how appalling it is that this racial achievement gap exists, and it needs to be on every American’s radar screen. Fixing our education system needs to be a much bigger part of our local and national political discussions.

Again... trying to fix the symptom and ignoring the root cause of the disease.

 

Unfortunately, doubling the funding and/or improving the teacher quality will not move these abysmal numbers significantly.

 

Until the cultural and social issues that are driving the problem are addressed... things won't get any better.

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shoutGeee

 

shoutNCTexan

 

Consider the conditions in which these children are reared.

 

Then consider the student full of potential returning to his home with a single mother and one or more unmarried men. Not much studying could go on, nor is there incentive.

 

We glorify sex outside of marriage without regard of the consequences. In this case, kids growing up in hell holes in extreme cases.

 

It affects all races but impacts blacks most.

41 percent is the rate for the overall U.S. population born to unwed mothers in 2008

17 percent of Asians were born to unwed mothers in 2008

29 percent of whites were born to unwed mothers in 2008

53 percent of Hispanics were born to unwed mothers in 2008

66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008

 

AND

 

72 percent of African-Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008

 

From Black Christian News

 

Black Christian News: 72% of All Black Babies Are Born to Unmarried Mothers

 

Seventy-two percent of black babies are born to unmarried mothers today, according to government statistics. This number is inseparable from the work of Carroll, an obstetrician who has dedicated her 40-year career to helping black women.

 

snipStatistics show just what that fullness means. Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and have their own children out of wedlock.

 

The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent.

 

snip

That logic rings false to Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose book "Race, Wrongs and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century" argues that even though discrimination caused blacks' present problems, only black action can cure them.

 

"The black community has fallen into this horribly dysfunctional equilibrium" with unwed mothers, Wax says in an interview. "It just doesn't work."

 

"Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation."

 

"The 21st century for the black community is about building human capital," says Wax, who is white. "That is the undone business. That is the unmet need. That is the completion of the civil rights mission."snip

 

 

 

 

We are going to reap bitter seeds from this policy of rewarding illegitimate births via welfare.

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shoutGeee

 

shoutNCTexan

 

“Can you imagine my shock when I went into a welfare department and said, 'Do you mean to tell me that a woman can come in here every nine months and begin to get checks for another illegitimate child?' The welfare man said, 'Oh, no, Mrs. Newman, she has to claim a different man as father every time or else she doesn’t get the money.'"

—Patty Newman

snip

 

 

From

 

1994 Issue The Dangerous Samaritans: How We Unintentionally Injure the Poor Michael Bauman, Professor of Theology and Culture, Hillsdale College

snip

 

We think we are doing the right thing. We think that if we pass laws to raise their wages and lower their rent, if we give generously to help support mothers without husbands and children without fathers, we can aid the poor in their flight from poverty and alleviate much of their distress.

 

We are wrong.

 

We forget that good intentions are not enough, and that massive government programs carry unintended consequences. We forget that aiming is not hitting, and that meaning well is not necessarily doing well.

 

snip

 

Welfare Laws

Third, we think that by transferring money as generously as we can afford to the mothers of illegitimate children, we can soften the pains of youngsters without fathers and of mothers without husbands. We forget what insurance companies call the “moral hazard,” which is insuring against a disaster in a way that encourages it to happen.

 

Insurance companies know all too well that people respond to incentives. If the fire insurance policy on a floundering business pays more money to the owner than the owner can get from operating it, that business may go up in smoke—literally. Likewise, if a life insurance policy pays off so lucratively that the insured’s beneficiaries are better off if the insured is dead, death sometimes results. If medical insurance covers too great a portion of medical expenses, people tend to apply for treatment of illnesses that are hardly illnesses at all, thus tying up doctors and hospitals with relatively trivial cases. In other words, when we reach the point of moral hazard, fire insurance causes fires, life insurance causes death, and medical insurance causes illness. Not surprisingly, insurance companies always try very hard to avoid the moral hazard inherent in insurance.

 

We don’t.

 

In our rush to do well for households without a male breadwinner, we forget that welfare is poverty insurance, and, as a result, we actually help cause the problem we intend to alleviate. By making illegitimate children a credential for increased financial support, we make certain more illegitimate children are born. And we do so in a particularly amoral way. As Patty Newman, author of Pass the Poverty, relates: “Can you imagine my shock when E went into a welfare department and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that a woman can come in here every nine months and begin to get checks for another illegitimate child?’ The welfare man said, ‘Oh, no, Mrs. Newman, she has to claim a different man as father every time or else she doesn’t get the money.’

 

Tragically, the more illegitimate children a woman has, the more deeply she becomes mired in poverty, and the less likely it is that she can ever extricate herself, despite the money she is given by government. Welfare is, in the words of Robert Rector, an incentive program from Hell. As long as we pay the poor to continue doing the very things that help make them poor in the first place, poor they shall remain.

 

Put differently, what you pay for is what you get. Because single motherhood is what we decide to pay for with our tax money, more single mothers are what we get. The tragic fact is that in the last decade or so in America, more than 80 percent of the children born in the urban black underclass were born out of wedlock and without an adult male to accept any financial responsibility for them. Of course, rising illegitimacy is neither a distinctively black nor a distinctively American problem. Sweden, for example, which subsidizes its unwed mothers even more generously than we do, has the highest rate of illegitimacy in the world. Just as when you tax something, you get less of it, when you subsidize it, you get more. Today, we are subsidizing immoral behavior on a grand scale. As a result, immoral behavior flourishes all around us, while those who practice it are harmed. This is no way to bring morality to the marketplace.

 

Another unintended consequence of our efforts to aid single mothers and their children is that low income husbands are made extraneous. Welfare actually drives them from the home. The average total relief package for a single mother with three children is more than $19,000 a year—tax free. By comparison, a traditional two-parent family of four with a higher income of, say $22,500, has only about $18,000 left after taxes. Poor women might be poor, but they are not stupid. Neither are poor young men, many of whom quickly realize that by their own efforts and means they are unable to provide as well for their families as does their rich Uncle Sam in Washington.

snip

 

The above was written in 1994.

 

The government didn't pay attention then, and it is not paying attention today.

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To Quote Dr. shoutValin

 

 

 

I'm not completely worthless. I can be used as a bad example. And once in a while I find an acorn.

;)

 

 

Pepper

 

Thanks for these two posts!

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