A reader responded to an earlier post about Florida’s decision to set different academic goals for children of different races:
“As a Florida teacher since 1997, I have watched our state board enact bone-headed policies that make no sense, but of all of them, the race-based variable learning goals has to be most useless and inane, not to mention anti-education and unworkable. There are so many questions about the way these standards will be applied I wonder how they expect school districts to carry them out. If a child is mixed race, are they allowed to self-identify or must they submit to a DNA test or bring independent verification like a copy of their family’s Census report? What if the parents refuse to choose a race? If a child belongs to several categories, which takes priority or will school districts be able to categorize the student in a way that is most favorable to the district? E.g. where would a poor, disabled, Spanish-speaking Asian belong? Many Hispanic identify themselves as white or black. Could their category be subdivided to reflect their individual identity? The disabled category could include a wide range of classifications from blind and deaf to autism to learning disabled. Would all of these be classified in the same way? The only saving grace I find in the whole plan is the admission that NCLB’s goal of 100% of students reading and doing math on grade level by 2014 is impossible. Is it fair with so much riding on student performance and teachers being graded on how well their students progress to grade a school with a high number of Asian and white students more harshly than a school with a large number of black, Hispanics and disabled?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gee, I thought Texas had this market cornered. Guess not! Think Virginia tried this as well. Brainiacs!
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The ultimate stupidity of the NCLB waiver is that all students are still expected to achieve 100 percent proficiency but in 2020 instead of 2014. If they haven’t even come close in the 10 years since NCLB, how will they do so in 2020? If you haven’t already read my satirical take on the perverse actions that districts and administrators will do to meet the race based achievement goals, go to kafkateach.wordpress.com and read my post “Brave New School.”
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Do they not realize that this sort of categorization is unconstitutional? Once again politicians are trying to avoid the real reason why children have trouble achieving in school—-poverty. They don’t want to deal with poverty becasue it would mean spending money on reducing it. Yes, some poor children are successful in school, but it is usually because there is someone in the family or a neighbor who is a professional or at least well read who serves as a role model for that child. The other issue would be if the family is not generationally poor, that they had the death of a major breadwinner or were messed up by the recession. Middle class black children who go to schools where the expectations are of success exhibit success oriented behavior. Poor white children in socio-economically poor schools do as poorly as poor black children. It is going to be interesting as the children of Bush’s recession grow up how they will do.
For now though, labeling children based on race remains inapprorpiate and unconstitutional. What happens to the ones whose mothers have a college education, but, due to circumstances beyond their control such as a disability, being abandoned or the recession are on welfare? And like the writer proposed, What about a biracial child–Asian, black and Hispanic with a disability??? Ironically I once knew a little girl who was black and Puerto Rican. She was being raised by her mother and her mother’s lesbian partner. They lived in public housing and both worked low level jobs. She did very well in school because her two mamas believed in her and in her doing well in school. She went to her neighborhood PUBLIC school, by the way. I now know a little girl who was bullied in school so much that it made her physically ill beause she was bi-racial (the only one in the all black school) and also high verbal and cared about learning. She also had an obvious case of ADHD. Her mother was on SSI but was in a vocational school. She hollered until her child was allowed to move to a magnet school where she is around other high achievers, still mostly black, and the bullying stopped. Last time I heard she was doing well in the school with high expectations. Disability, poor, mama with disability, bi-racial and her babysitter is mentally retarded (Add that one to the mix since mama was in school full time so the sitter is a strong influence.) Doing well because of high expectations.
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Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the achievement gap is because teachers are racists:
http://www.courant.com/community/windsor/hc-bridging-achievement-gap-1020-20121019,0,7135180.story
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I’m generally opposed to the charter school/voucher movement and black, and don’t get the overreaction to the Florida BoE announcing these goals (or estimates). People on the left are portraying it as anti-black racism, and those on the right see it as an attempt to give black students an unfair leg up on white students. Both views are exasperating and beyond silly.
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What is the point of setting a “racial goal” for achievement?
I don’t understand.
Isn’t every individual different?
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The way I read it, they’re not so much “goals” as they are estimates or projections of where different groups of students will be, on average, in 2014 with regard to performing at grade level. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
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What is the point of setting a “racial goal” for achievement?
To show progress on equity/gap-closing. Courts and other monitoring organizations (ICERD) want numbers.
Do they not realize that this sort of categorization is unconstitutional?
The United States is expected to take appropriate actions to remedy the effects of past discrimination. Like this:
“The Committee recommends … [measures] to reduce the persistent ‘achievement gap’ between students belonging to racial, ethnic or national minorities and white students in the field of education … [and] step up its efforts to make government officials, the judiciary, federal and state law enforcement officials, teachers, social workers and the public in general aware about … the Convention”
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Below is an opinion piece from Michael Quinn Sullivan, a mouth piece financed by a millioniare from Midland Tex (he’s into charter schools among other political ventures;-)
This guy loves to stretch and bend the truth. I haven’t seen any mention of him in any of the posts on this blog, so I thought I’d entertain you.
http://www.empowertexans.com/features/innovation-not-debt-key-to-better-schools/
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Good question for the Florida standardized math test.
One of my very best friends is black. He married a very fair-haired must be from some place in northern Europe woman. Let’s say she is white. Their daughter who is half-black and half-white married a man who is pretty much white it looks like, though maybe a little Cherokee in there but let’s discount that. They have two lovely daughters. What is the level of attainment their daughters need on their Florida tests if the White (Causcasian) level on the tests if 86% and the Black (African American) level on the test is 74%?
Answer: Well, this is not a tough question and since it has nothing to do with talking pineapples is easily answerable. My friend’s daughter needed to attain an 80% score since there is a 12 point difference between 86 and 74 and she is half-white and half-black so half would be 6 points. 74 + 6 = 80. Her daughers each need an 83% passing number since the difference between her score of 80% and her husband’s Causcasian score is 6 points and half would be 3 points. So the answer is 83%. 80 + 3 = 83.
How did you do?
Lucky they kept the Cherokee stuff out of the question or it might have ended up like the talking pineapple question. Maybe they will add it when Arne Duncan complains their standards need to be more rigorous.
It is easy to see where all this might get complicated so maybe Florida needs to hire Pearson to determine the race designation of each kid in each school. Let’s see at $100 per kid for the ancestry work up alone, not counting other consultants to see if it is a good idea, comes to ……………
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Steve, You made me laugh the first time all day! And maybe Florida could recalculate my VAM score based on my mixed heritage. I wonder if it would help or hurt…
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Charter school political campaign contributions in Florida are increasing. I thought that if you didn’t have the support of the teachers unions, you had no luck? I guess that was a lie.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/charter-school-companies-online-learning-outfits-try-to-wield-more/1257714
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More fallout from Florida’s VAM.
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/little-more-vam-pinellas
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Does anybody comfortable with what has happened remember George W. Bush Jr? NCLB? It’s offspring RTTT? I think you could quite fairly [and, IMHO, in a non-partisan fashion] characterize the Florida decision as the overt written expression of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Dubya, you hit the nail on the head! Except you might not have wanted to hit that particular Florida nail so hard…
🙂
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I can see from the comments that many readers did not understand what the Florida race-based standards really are. Under NCLB, schools were broken down into sub-categories with proficiency goals for each sub-category. The cut score was the same no matter what the race but schools were supposed to set proficiency goals based on past performance with the purpose of achieving 100% proficiency (that is all students getting a passing score) by 2014. This was the infamous AYP that had to be scrapped because the Florida schools were on their way to 100% failure rate by federal standards even though a large majority of schools earn an A, B or C grade. What is different about the new policy is that it sets a state-wide standard and attempts to even the playing field, since the majority of D and F schools have large numbers of disabled and minority students. The new policy also recognizes that 100% proficiency by 2014 is impossible and kicks the can down the road to 2020. It is a shame that the feds as well as the state refuse to admit that the whole premise behind NCLB as well as RTTT are unreasonable and unworkable.
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Palm Beach County, FL is currently looking at applying for the District Race to the Top. In their application, they reveal that they will be setting different goals for each race- in an effort to measure closing the gap. Whites only have to improve by 2% for example, while African- Americans must improve by 6% in 3rd grade reading. It’s absolutely ridiculous. This is what has come of education?
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Metrics gone mad.
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