NY officials to scrap literacy test for teachers because "Blacks and Hispanics couldnt pass".

originally posted by: Indigo5

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE

originally posted by: Indigo5

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE
There we go...the liberal way. If you can't hold a job...no problem. If you can't support yourself...no problem. So you steal from Walmart...that's fine. Maybe you're a stupid idiot...teach us.

If the left sinks the bar any lower, we will be electing sea cucumbers President next.

You might win the prize for the most un-informed post of the thread?

Obviously reading beyond the OP headline proved too great a challenge for you?

A+ For political troll verbiage!
F for reading comprehension!

Well...then lets try it this way. If Blacks and Latinos are equals (as I believe they are) they should be able to take the same test and score just as well.

This is a faulted definition of equal. Culture, ways of thinking and physicality differ in significant ways..."Equality" is the idea that those differences do not make people less or more in their fundamental worth.

No doubt men are better at Football and Boxing than women...Does that make women not "equal"?
Women perform better than men in most Gymnastics events..are they superior to men?
Sickle Cell Anemia effects African Americans. Are they physically inferior to whites?
Etc. etc.

Gender, race, ethnicity, upbringing and culture all effect how we perform in different challenges.
Gender, race, ethnicity, upbringing and culture do not make us any less "equal" to our fellow human beings.

I think that the academic trajectory of many Latino's and African Americans likely did not prepare them to do in depth literary analysis of the biography and life story of Gertrude Stein (sample question I provided).

Most schools in the Latino and African American communities for economic reasons are focused on teaching the fundamentals and likely have less resources to spend time on teaching in depth literary analysis.

In impoverished communities, many of the kids are facing stressors at home (hunger, crime, drugs, violence) which make them a challenge to teachers and teachers are forced to retreat to the delivering the fundamentals vs. less important topics (literary analysis)...and all the students in those schools are subject to that more focused curriculum.

I also believe that does not make them any less likely to potentially be a great teacher, nor less "equal" than their "white" counterparts.

Well...at least the temper calmed down. That is appreciated. And you have pointed out something. If a man is better at football, then that man is likely better to teach football than the woman...correct? While I would agree that in general, "worth" is a combination of many aspects of a person and sometimes a group. You can tell from professional basketball that black men are generally better for example. That isn't racist...but if you claim that black men are worse at something...here comes the hate.

But back to the point. If I, we or whomever want a certain criteria taught in schools, then the teachers should be expert teachers in those areas. If that means white women aren't right for men's basketball and black men aren't the best for math, then so be it.

My point is and was quite simple. The teacher should always be the best choice from the group of candidates based upon their experience, intelligence and ability to teach. Not their race, gender, etc.

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE
Well...then lets try it this way. If Blacks and Latinos are equals (as I believe they are) they should be able to take the same test and score just as well. There aren't white questions any more than there is white blood, white intelligence or white comprehension. If you are claiming that whites are simply smarter than the other races you named...then just say it. I don't see it that way.

The way you get the best individuals by using a test is to ask the hard, difficult and confusing questions. Let them use their brains and collect the best of the tested group. When you lower the standards of the tests, you get people of lower calibur and if you choose to lower the test for the REASON of assuring more blacks and latinos pass...you are insulting them...or calling them out as not as intelligent / smart...or simply depriving our children of the BEST education possible.

Do Google, Microsoft and Facebook lower the quality of their tests to include more black people? If so...they are calling black people less intelligent than white people and I don't believe that is true. In fact...it is INSULTING to the blacks that CAN pass the tests.

What NY is doing (typical liberal) is lowering the scale to make even the ignorant, acceptable. As they try to lower the social bar to make scum acceptable, lowering the crime bar to allow more criminals to not be classified as criminals and (obviously) lowering the bar on Politicians to allow for the corrupt Clintons, scuzzy Pelosis and criminal DNC.

Your posts have actually provided the complete justification as to why programs like affirmative action are a thing, it's odd you don't realize this. As you say, if blacks and latinos are just as capable as whites, then it stands to reason that an average sample of any race should produce a similar test score.

But it doesn't, latinos and blacks score lower than whites and asians. Which means it's something systemic in their culture, and that if you take people out of that culture and put them in the same environment as whites... they should do just as well, That's why those programs exist, to lift families up one job at a time.

As i said at the start of this thread, I bet that if you broke test scores down by school, the students who scored worse would mostly be from the same area.

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE


My point is and was quite simple. The teacher should always be the best choice from the group of candidates based upon their experience, intelligence and ability to teach. Not their race, gender, etc.

And my point is that the test was poorly built to evaluate that.

Eliminating the test is not lowering the bar...It is eliminating a bar that did not measure the right things.

Frankly...IMHO...what it did measure was a literary analysis skill-set mostly taught at private High schools on the Upper East Side..Which is great, but not necessarily something that should used to eliminate good people trying to enter a program to become teachers.

BTW...did you notice THIS from the OP article?

Charles Sahm, the director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, is a strong supporter of raising the bar for teachers but not a fan of this particular literacy test.


Sahm took the $20 practice exam and thought it was a poorly designed test with multiple-choice questions that seemed to have more than one correct answer.


"I do agree that it's not a great test," Sahm said. "I found the reading comprehension section to be kind of infuriating. I only got 21 out of 40 right."

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE
Well...then lets try it this way. If Blacks and Latinos are equals (as I believe they are) they should be able to take the same test and score just as well. There aren't white questions any more than there is white blood, white intelligence or white comprehension. If you are claiming that whites are simply smarter than the other races you named...then just say it. I don't see it that way.

The way you get the best individuals by using a test is to ask the hard, difficult and confusing questions. Let them use their brains and collect the best of the tested group. When you lower the standards of the tests, you get people of lower calibur and if you choose to lower the test for the REASON of assuring more blacks and latinos pass...you are insulting them...or calling them out as not as intelligent / smart...or simply depriving our children of the BEST education possible.

Do Google, Microsoft and Facebook lower the quality of their tests to include more black people? If so...they are calling black people less intelligent than white people and I don't believe that is true. In fact...it is INSULTING to the blacks that CAN pass the tests.

What NY is doing (typical liberal) is lowering the scale to make even the ignorant, acceptable. As they try to lower the social bar to make scum acceptable, lowering the crime bar to allow more criminals to not be classified as criminals and (obviously) lowering the bar on Politicians to allow for the corrupt Clintons, scuzzy Pelosis and criminal DNC.

As i said at the start of this thread, I bet that if you broke test scores down by school, the students who scored worse would mostly be from the same area.

Not going to hunt it down now..people can find it on their own if they like..

But during the drama around SATs and African Americans performing worse on some portions? Asians performing better than whites on some sections..

When they drilled on the numbers...They found rural impoverished whites scoring the same as African Americans from poor communities..They found African Americans doing the same as Whites in upper income communities..They found the Asian boost was only good for one generation at best..Asian immigrant parents placing high academic demands on their kids..

In short it is a geography and economic issue..Race has got nothing to do with it.

originally posted by: ketsuko
So, how on earth is one supposed to form an opinion? Do you just exist in a vacuum and hope that thoughts osmos into your head? You're making all kinds of assumptions to assume that because something is a blog that facts are not presented.

Form an opinion by proving it is true. Don't believe something just because you were taught to believe it. Actually demonstrate it.

And, of course, I note that you are here which is full of about 99% opinion, including, I might add, yours. So what is it that you hope to accomplish here? If you truly believe what you wrote, then you aren't doing anything except rank hypocrisy by writing screeds of your own opinion here day after day.

Well, I don't tell anyone that my opinion is 100% correct. If you've ever asked me about it, I've probably told you that I'm pretty sure every opinion and belief I have is false... I just haven't figured out how/why yet. Sometimes I argue just to see if I can defend my opinion, if I can't then it means I've potentially discovered one of those hows and whys I don't have it all figured out.

For the most part though, I'm here because of things like conspiracies and aliens. We just don't get much of that content anymore. While I stay somewhat tuned into politics, following day to day partisan bickering isn't really a hobby of mine even though I mostly participate in political threads in the absence of anything else that interests me. I much prefer looking at the impact of something 25, 35, or even 50 years down the road while most of politics in the US revolves more around the he said/she said mudslinging of the day.

Oh, and it's usually the uneducated who tell others how to think. If you've actually got a good idea, a brief exposure is enough, the surrounding facts will verify it on it's own, it won't need cheerleaders.

originally posted by: Tiger5

originally posted by: thegeneraldisarray

originally posted by: TarzanBeta
Next up - scrapping literacy tests for students.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) that college professors have gotten flak because they were correcting "African American Vernacular English" which is just a floofy term for what used to be known as "jive."

Can't be oppressing the Basketball-Americans.

When I taught in the UK white teacher old me not to correct the predominantly white kids poor English using a red pen as I would crush their intellect. I continued to highlight every grammatical error in red because:

1) was taught like that.
2) At my science university the whole year was warned that science was also about communication hence our first papers would be return stiff with red ink.

and

3) The world can be a terrible place if you have NO JOb!

I wanted the best for my students and loved poking my fingers in the eyes of conservative idiots!

Hi Tiger!

You seem to have quite a 'chip' on your shoulder regarding the failure of Basketball-Americans to pass a simple test.

Your sentence structure and your unusual use of prepositions, adjectives and poor syntax gives little credibility to your claim of; 'white teacher old me not to correct the predominantly white kids poor English using a red pen as I would crush their intellect' (sic).

Perhaps I could construct a more inclusive exam-question better suited to your 'type'?

1. Defawna has two KFC buckets and Derodney steals one. How many buckets of KFC does Defawna have left?

A. Question be raciss.
B. I don't like KFC.
C. I didn't bother to read the question as I know I will get the job as I meet the diversity quota.
D. I forgot my pen.

Realize the truth;It will set you and your resentment, free.

this is so simple you can't read you can't teach then sue the college that gave you your diploma because they committed fraud.

originally posted by: proteus33
this is so simple you can't read you can't teach then sue the college that gave you your diploma because they committed fraud.

Or maybe instead you sue to agency testing you for giving you a test that obviously is slanted against people of non white racial groups.

A really nice, and current, bit posted on Quora

www.quora.com...

I'm not from New York, and haven't seen the Last-2 test. However, I am a teacher in a racially-diverse school that administers standardized tests annually, and has been doing required annual state testing since the late 1990s.

One of the top things I see in test administration that affects children of poverty, and children of minority races, is the vocabulary thrown into a test question. I say "thrown", because it is vocabulary not essential to the question.

A question like "Which of these organisms is a consumer?" is an effective use of vocabulary. On the other side, my made-up example of "Which ambulatory homo sapien is the protagonist of the short story?" is an absurd display of vocabulary. If all the characters in the story were people who could walk, why include those vocabulary words when your supposed goal is to get the student to identify the protagonist of a short story? They do it just to mess with a student, and the students that get tripped up the fastest are students of poverty.

My district, my fellow teachers, and I myself have estimated that 40% of a math test comes down not to math knowledge, but in knowing the vocabulary on a test and knowing what the question is really asking. That reading threshold to a math test shouldn't be that high, in my opinion.

If a question asked "Find the zeroes of y=x^2 -5x + 6", my students would be able to do it.

If a question asked "Find the zeroes of f(x)=x^2 -5x + 6", my students would be able to do it. Some students in other teachers' classes would be lost at this question, wondering what the f stands for.

If a question asked "Find the zeroes of y=x^2 -5x + 6", and listed the answer choices in set notation [2,3] , or [-2,-3], now only 80% of my students would be able to do it. That's still most of the class, and that 20% didn't pay attention. They know how to do the problem if you asked them orally, but misunderstand and substitute in two different numbers for the two different x's. I'm starting to feel like the test is missing their abilities, but at that point I could still entertain arguments that they should be able to perform even when given set notation (even though set notation in that context confuses rather than clarifies the math.) However, we move on to...

If a question asked "Find the zeroes of y=x^2 -5x + 6", but asked it in a business context about profit and breaking even, you've immediately lost half of my class if you don't simultaneously provide definitions. How can we expect with certainty that twelve year olds have heard the term "breaking even"? Growing up, I was highly educated, and I knew profit meant money, but I was in college econ classes before I learned the difference between revenue and profit.

With that question, we have stopped testing them on the math skill, and started testing them on their applied economics vocabulary knowledge. Is that really fair?

- - - - -
Another prime example on Virginia's state Algebra test is the annual question, "What binomial is a factor of x^2 + 7x + 12?"
A) x - 3 B) x - 4 C) x + 3 D) x + 6
My students can also answer the question "Which of these expressions is a factor of x^2 + 7x +12?"
A) x - 3 B) x - 4 C) x + 3 D) x + 6

You may think those two questions are the same question, and you are right with regard to the mathematics. They are no different in their level of rigor.

However, in testing, the outcome of the two wordings is staggering.

Many students with low vocabularies (read: students in poverty, students with disadvantaged backgrounds) will absolutely bomb the question when it includes the word "binomial", a word that itself had no bearing on the question being asked.

The wealthy white kids proceed through the question with no difficulty, mentally crossing out the word binomial and figuring out what the question is really asking. My low readers get tripped up by the word "binomial" and can't imagine what the question is asking. Sure, we've learned the word "binomial", but during testing they start inventing new mathematical processes because they assume that the question is as hard as its hardest vocabulary word. They have trouble crossing out the tough word and moving on.

A single, non-essential word in a question can drop the level of success of students by 40%. That's testing their reading comprehension skills, not their mathematical abilities.

Rich kids, with highly educated parents, generally have larger vocabularies and stronger reading comprehension than poor kids with low-educated parents. I want my math standardized tests measuring my student's math abilities, not measuring their socioeconomic status.

Quoted the whole thing, for our link clicking challenged readers.

a reply to: Aazadan

Welcome to Hartford, CT, where the Affirmative Action diversity standards are now actively keeping Latinos and blacks out of a college prep magnet school because to let more in would upset the diversity ratios. There aren't enough whites, you see and if they let in more qualified minority students, then the school wouldn't be diverse enough.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

It's about reading to your kids. That's a very simple way to even that out. Reading to your kid at night, at bedtime is not a difficult thing to do.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

It's about reading to your kids. That's a very simple way to even that out. Reading to your kid at night, at bedtime is not a difficult thing to do.

Maybe not for you.

Poor people aren't poor just because of luck of the draw. Reading skills are a prime example of what separates have and have not. My dad wasn't stupid...but he wasn't the most literate man. My literacy comes from my own personal curiosity. I have 2 sisters who (God bless their hearts) are rather dull. Dad didn't read to us. I saw him try once, and he did so poorly that my 3 year old sister was correcting him, which humiliated him greatly. Of course she couldn't read, she had it memorized.

no amount of good schooling will make up for the lure of big bucks and the ability to be a lazy useless member of society.

You mean like some of the ceos which basically collapse the value of a company, year after year while being paid millions, eventually get fired and get a golden parachute worth tens of millions?

Society says if you've got lots of money, aka if you're rich, you can earn in a couple of months more than what hundreds do in their entire lifetime, without lifting a finger, solely from your investments. But here's the thing, if you're traveling all over the world and eating caviar, perhaps as inheritor of wealth from an old monopoly, being related to some nobility or royalty, it doesn't matter how unfairly you got your resources, you're considered useful.

The countless middlemen throughout society, that benefit and get wealthy merely from the works of others, they're considered highly useful.

Yet an individual is brought into this world in sub-optimal conditions, with no free education, no free housing, no free healthcare, no free food. You know they were brought to this world without their consent, and it was society that allowed this to happen, because it needs newborns to perpetuate itself, out of sheer necessity.

We're finally coming to an age where automation can abolish the need for work, it is within decades barring catastrophe, we should accelerate the arrival of this new age, and share the proceeds of the automated economy, the automated workforce. Given the finite planet with finite resources, it is time for growth to come to an end and for reproduction to be regulated, to ensure population stays at a level where everyone can be wealthy. If you've a finite pie, the smaller the number of individuals consuming the pie, the bigger the slice per individual.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Indigo5
Coursera...And a ton of other resources...youtube "classes" or series for example..

The internet had really revolutionized the opportunity to learn without attending University.

The problem with all that stuff is that it's the "quick and easy" route. For example the Udacity Nanodegree. Nanodegrees have nano value. A 4 year degree, which means you understand the very basics of a subject contains about 5200 hours worth of lecture and study time (24 relevant classes, at 18 weeks per class, and 12 hours per class per week). These nanodegrees are advertised as 8 hours/week for 6 months (I used this one for reference www.udacity.com...). That's 192 hours, less than 4% of the same instruction time and of a worse quality. Their entire courseload doesn't even equate to the same number of hours as a single semester class and they also charge far more than a single in person class does.

Higher price, lower quality, zero credibility, and you don't even get accreditation to one day build up to something greater out of it.

On top of that, if sitting a student infront of a screen to watch videos all day was an effective teaching tool, we wouldn't send kids to school, we would just have them watch TV all day long.

There are plenty of excellent online courses with none of the BS. You also have access to free recordings from MIT and also from Ivy league universities. And also there is amazon where you can view textbook reviews on just about any topic, and choose the best reviewed book from the topic of your choice... you're not limited to that 80s outdated book that doesn't explain things well that your professor uses.

If you've access to top notch university undergrad and graduate level textbooks, online courses and dedicated forums from experts, that's very good. You also have access to the latest scientific journals with state of the art research.

Also unlike in a university, where there might even be one required course with not so good or perhaps even a terrible professor, online you choose and if the content is not good you're free to leave and learn elsewhere from a more effective source. In a university if one of the courses you require is only given by a professor that's not so good, you have to put up with it or transfer.

Also you end up with a high debt.

In the end you forget a lot of what you're taught anyway, such is human memory. Ideally job interviews, and proper tests would make sure you're qualified, and all this qualified certification would be done away with.

Ironically, my cousin is a teacher, he teaches French.

Where does he fit in?

I used to be a military recruiter and can tell you a lot of applicants from HBC's had trouble passing our entrance exam (ASVAB). Now mind you the Math and English components are roughly on a GED level. The math knowledge, arithmetic reasoning, work knowledge, and paragraph comprehension sections determine if you pass or fail. Most of the time you had to make a 31 or above. Sometimes a 50 during recruiting slow downs. To lend perspective a 99 indicated you were in the top 1 percent of testers, 50 top half and 31 top 69 percent. The other sections determined what MOS (jobs) you qualified for. You had to pass to unlock any though.

One woman I will never forget. She had a Masters in Education from an HBC and was teaching Math at a local elementary school. She made an 8.

The point of school is to teach kids how to learn, not what to learn.

Some can do this without school. If that can't be done, all hope is lost unless they're a privileged drone.

The 'extra little' programs work wonders at creating more of these kids ultimately.

Taking extra attention from them isn't doing anyone favors for poverty, it's bottle necking the few that rise above it.

Saying "Blacks and Hispanics couldn't pass" really diminishes that value of the ones that did with broad generalizations about what people in general are capable of.

Attention means everything. It's an unspoken sport among rich people to make others rich with their mere presence and showing of doors for them to open on their own. Why doesn't that apply to education? Surely the kid with 10 teachers verses the teacher with 10 kids will learn more, more often, and when one of the 10 makes it above standard, it's the statistics of 10 rolls pushing the outlier, nothing about an individual being able to give less attention makes them a good teacher. They just happened to get a good student. The success of massive attention on the other hand is obvious in some cases.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: WeAreAWAKE
Well...then lets try it this way. If Blacks and Latinos are equals (as I believe they are) they should be able to take the same test and score just as well. There aren't white questions any more than there is white blood, white intelligence or white comprehension. If you are claiming that whites are simply smarter than the other races you named...then just say it. I don't see it that way.

The way you get the best individuals by using a test is to ask the hard, difficult and confusing questions. Let them use their brains and collect the best of the tested group. When you lower the standards of the tests, you get people of lower calibur and if you choose to lower the test for the REASON of assuring more blacks and latinos pass...you are insulting them...or calling them out as not as intelligent / smart...or simply depriving our children of the BEST education possible.

Do Google, Microsoft and Facebook lower the quality of their tests to include more black people? If so...they are calling black people less intelligent than white people and I don't believe that is true. In fact...it is INSULTING to the blacks that CAN pass the tests.

What NY is doing (typical liberal) is lowering the scale to make even the ignorant, acceptable. As they try to lower the social bar to make scum acceptable, lowering the crime bar to allow more criminals to not be classified as criminals and (obviously) lowering the bar on Politicians to allow for the corrupt Clintons, scuzzy Pelosis and criminal DNC.

Your posts have actually provided the complete justification as to why programs like affirmative action are a thing, it's odd you don't realize this. As you say, if blacks and latinos are just as capable as whites, then it stands to reason that an average sample of any race should produce a similar test score.

But it doesn't, latinos and blacks score lower than whites and asians. Which means it's something systemic in their culture, and that if you take people out of that culture and put them in the same environment as whites... they should do just as well, That's why those programs exist, to lift families up one job at a time.

As i said at the start of this thread, I bet that if you broke test scores down by school, the students who scored worse would mostly be from the same area.

Watch doctor strange or the movie Blackhat. Look at the protagonists, look at the inhabitants of those foreign countries. Notice anything peculiar? Why do they look like giants amongst dwarfs?

Look at the average height of the japanese versus the average height of say an american, a quick google will tell you. This is a complex multigene trait, yet we can see that the averages across entire populations differ.

Intellectual capacity is no different in kind from say height, it is a complex multi gene trait, but it too can differ on average between populations. And just like some populations can be giants and others pygmies when it comes to height, there are populations that are bound to be the giants and pygmies of intellectual capacity, with other populations coming somewhere in between.

It is not politically correct, but once we get the genetics of intelligence down, and the nature of intelligence, there will be a quick google for the average intelligence of say the average chinese versus the average american. We can debate IQ, but once we truly define intelligence, and know its genetics, it will be as plain and undeniable as height or skin color. Arguing that one group is not on average smarter will be like arguing that men aren't on average taller and stronger than women.

a reply to: Xenogears

Intellectual capacity is no different in kind from say height, it is a complex multi gene trait, but it too can differ on average between populations.

It can? Can you provide more information about this? I find the claim, though not uncommon, lacking in evidence. Tell me, what is your stance on eugenics?

Arguing that one group is not on average smarter will be like arguing that men aren't on average taller and stronger than women.

This, coming from someone who cites Hollywood as evidence. Thanks, but no thanks.

a reply to: Smellthecoffee


I am dyslexic. You however have no excuse for your colossal ignorance. Trying to race bait me does not work. The simple fact is I am probably more educated than you. I probably have more money than you. And guess what I am damn happier than you. But feel free to spew.

I am not sure where you found the issue of a chip on my shoulder but that is a racist trope if I ever heard one. FYI it is also a very lazy trope because it is such a cliché. A bit like basketball players.

Anyway as for your penmanship your may achieve more by inserting it where the sun don't shine.

Have a great day troll

a reply to: Aazadan


At the time when affirmative action was first implemented it was at a time when very academically-able black people were being kept out of appropriate jobs. IMO affirmative action was fine and socially just. I wonder whether or not we need affirmative action now. I did not go to College in the US but those who did and subsequently went to work have expressed unease about the way the feel that they are viewed a being allowed in via the back door to a job/academia.


The point is one or two racists at key points in an organisation can smash a career.

a reply to: ketsuko

Affirmative Action can be taken too far or used improperly. Ideally we would look at every single person on a case by case basis, but we don't, because it's not practical to do so. It's probably overused at this point, but the concept itself should still exist.