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With NCLB Waiver, Virginia Sorts Kids' Scores By Race
According to a story at Northwest Public Radio, the state of Virginia's board of education has decided to institute different passing scores for standardized tests, based on the racial and cultural background of the students taking the test. Apparently the state has chosen to divide its student population into broad categories of black, white, Hispanic, and Asian — which takes painting with a rather broad brush, to put it mildly. From the article (there's an audio version linked as well): "As part of Virginia's waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities. ... Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities." (If officially determined group membership determines passing scores, why stop there?) Florida passed a similar measure last month.
My Asian children have become lazy Americans, so I have had them diagnosed with temporary learning disabilities.
Needless to say they are performing much better than their teachers expect of them, and have won countless awards for bravery in the face of their intellectual blight. Some parents even donate food - so now I don't have to pack any more lunches!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Thank you government for pointing us in the complete wrong direction. This is absolutely going to encourage racism.
Passing should be the same for everyone, how long did we have racial profiling laws that made it impossible for equality to exist, now in one move Virginia wants to completely defeat that. If there going to profile kids based of there race do they also seat kids based off there skin color, black kids at the back, Asian's at the front so they can answer the question more easily, whites in the middle to be forgotten and average and Hispanics where ever? Same idea just a different spin, this entire concept is offensive and unethical.
The headline is misleading. The actual pass/fail line for each student is unchanged. The state is changing what it considers an acceptable aggregate rate of passing for groups of students, choosing race as the criterion for grouping. The stated rationale is that students of different races have different starting points, so it makes sense to seek different final achievement levels. But even if you accept that approach, it seems lazy to use race as a surrogate for academic starting point.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
>> but in this case I do feel especially bad for Asian's and Whites given the higher requirement for them.
You've got it backwards: Feel bad for the other races, who won't be pushed to excel to the same level and will therefore be stuck in menial low-pay jobs for the rest of their lives.
Florida appears to have set the passing rate (and not the passing scores) differently (per TFA); while VA simple set different passing scores.
No, Virginia didn't. The shitty summary just made it look like they did.
Another ref, besides TFA: [Citation]
The new standards still require every student, regardless of background, to correctly answer the same number of questions to pass SOL tests.
For example, every student who takes the third-grade math exam must answer correctly 23 of 35 questions to pass, no matter their race or background. ...
The state did set new pass rates, or goals for how many students in each group pass each exam.
Using the same example of the third-grade math test: the state goal is for 45 percent of black students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly and for 82 percent of Asian students to answer 23 of 35 items correctly.
It's still stupid, ignorant, and racist as all get-out (redundancy noted), but black students won't be getting "C" grades for 45% scores.
Encourage racism? It is racism.
When I was a kid, I used to think that racism didn't happen. It was so illogical and obviously wrong. Even books that portrayed racism that "just was" in my countries past seemed to be set with an alien mentality. But then as I grew older I was exposed works like "American History X" (the son's descent into racism had flawed but plausible logic behind it) and it slowly dawned on me that there are experiences in life that encourage racism that are far more detrimental than simply being racist. Because they propagate it and it survives past the last generation on and on and anew again.
For example, let's say you were (and this is purely hypothetical by the way) beaten and mugged by Hispanics which led you to distrust any person even remotely resembling your attackers. It's wrong for you to scream at your housemaid that was paid to clean your house by your cleaning company. And it's wrong for you to call them up and hurl racial slurs at them for putting your life and property in danger. However, the really problematic aspect of that is when you sit down with your progeny when they're little and explain to them why people with a certain color to their skin are not to be trusted. This is something that encourages racism instead of just being racist.
But then racism was always OK as long as it's anti-white.
Well, I didn't really read this as anti-white. I saw this as actually racist towards all races since they are binning these young minds based on external appearances. Instead of trying to buck a trend, they have embraced it. To shed this discussion of your "it's anti-white" bias, allow me to relay what I see as being the real fallout from this action: an obsessive Asian student scores 100 on this test but an African American child scores 65 and is seen as being more successful than the Asian student. This allows students to progress on the path of education and causes resentment from the Asian child directed at the African American child. "They got it easy" will probably be the sentiment but could spawn a deep seated hatred or other negative stereotypes of their classmates. No need to bring Caucasian students in to that picture or claim it's just "anti-white."
Could you explain and give examples of racism that is okay because it's "anti-white"?
My work here is dung.
Wait a minute - I need to know what race you are so I can see how accurate your
back-of-the-envelope calculations
are.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
They screwed it up.
They shouldn't be classifying the kids into "racial" categories first and then setting grade requirements; that's silly.
They should assign the kids to racial categories based on their test scores instead.
After finishing the still, finishing the math PhD was the hardest thing I ever did.
Maybe you did these two things in the wrong order?
A week after the NBA's adoption of handicapped scoring based on racial backgrounds and disabilities, Jeremy Lin brought home an impressive performance, scoring 228 points in a single game. However, this wasn't enough to best the Lakers' newest recruit, a kid with no arms, whose managed to kick a single penalty free throw into the basket for a weighted point value of 685.