Slashdot Mirror
US Dept. of Education Teams With Microsoft-Led Teach.org On Teacher Diversity
theodp writes: Citing a new study that suggests academic achievement can benefit when children are taught by a teacher of their own race, the NY Times asks, Where Are the Teachers of Color? Towards that end, the Times reports that "Teach.org, a partnership between the Department of Education and several companies, teachers unions and other groups, is specifically targeting racial minorities for recruitment." Teach.org describes itself as a "public-private partnership led by Microsoft, State Farm and the U.S. Department of Education." To the consternation of some, the U.S. Dept. of Education delegated teacher recruitment to Microsoft in 2011. With its 2.2% African American/Black and 3.9% Latino/Hispanic tech workforce, who better to increase diversity than Microsoft, right?
Teach Dot Org
Behold the Borg
Keep mind & face clean
Or devoured by the warg
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Skin colour should never matter when hiring people. Never.
My parents are from the Indian sub-continent, and I was born in America
Yes, technically I am qualified to be a 'minority' in America, but as a Minority I do not necessary benefit more from being taught by 'minority teachers'
All I need is a teacher who is qualified, who is enthusiastic, who wants to share whatever knowledge he or she has with me, who knows how to communicate clearly and who is cheerful --- As for the race of that teacher, I do not care
That so-called 'study' is thus shipload of turd
How come my government is listening to those turd suckers in the first place?
Political correctness has no place in education !!
Seriously sounds like they are drifting towards an apartheid education system. That students tend to do better in the US with teachers of the same race (what ever the fuck that is meant to really mean, like human teachers or dog teachers or bird teachers or dolphin teachers), is a solid indication or problems of racism in the society at large and how it is brought into the education system. Race - biological http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... was only extended into arbitrary human http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rac... classification purely as a result of rampant prejudice and a specific desire to exclude people from competitive access in capitalist societies. Those statistics are not a measure of better teaching that are a measure of a fractured and failing society, as people within that society seek to avoid failure and drowning in poverty by pushing others down via what ever distinctions they can craft based upon, appearance, language, religion and culture. Those results should be a real wakeup moment of a serious problem.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So segregated schools would be the obvious (and wrong) answer? Black students go to a school with black teachers, and white kids go to a school with white teachers ?!?!?!
Ah, what ever happened to folks who thought like this:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I guess Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't dreaming . . . give the current state of race relations in the US . . . he was fantasizing.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So they are worried about race and not Gender. While boys are failing school more now than ever. They too can benefit from a system that caters to them as well. Where have all the male teachers gone. They have gone else where out of fear of being on a sex registry. And this with a female teacher being the face of high school and middle school sex scandal for years now.
If I can mod you up 1000 times, I will !
I came from China. Back in China all my teachers are Chinese - as China is full of Chinese naturally my teachers (good and bad) are Chinese
But when I landed on US of A none of my teachers / lecturers / professors (good and bad) happened to be ethnic Chinese
Did I ever fail to learn just because my teacher / lecturer / professor happened to be not of the same ethnic / racial background as me? Nope !
In fact, I find it utterly ridiculously to claim that students learn better with teachers of the same racial background, and you are so right --- Political Correctness has no place in Education!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yet another call for racial discrimination, based on nothing much. I skimmed the paper, and looked particularly at the results sections. The authors cherry-pick the positive correlations, and ignore the negative ones.
It happens that they have a weak positive correlation for black students taught by black teachers, but the correlation for hispanics is universally negative and for asians the correlation is negative everywhere except math. Somehow, the authors forgot to mention the negative correlations in their abstract, and TFA certainly doesn't pick up on them.
Overall, the number of positive and negative correlations is very nearly equal, which leads to the suspicion that the paper represents a careful analysis of random noise.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
... that's what they want
I am a Chinese, born in China
In the US of A I am an *outsider* --- and if I want to forever remain an *outsider*, I can
In other words, if I remain an *outsider* that is because I choose to be an *outsider*
Look, man ! In this thread there is an Indian American (who was born in America) and a Chinese American, who was born in China already chimed in, and we share the same view, that the idea in which students can learn better from teachers who share the same racial background as them (the students) as a totally ridiculous notion
Political Correctness has no place in Education!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So, using the same line of thinking, they are also promoting hiring more male teachers to properly educate the boys in the classroom ? The elementary school that my kids went to saw their last male teacher leave a few years ago.
Where are the X percentage of race or gender in Y field? Enough with the quotas. Enough with people looking at statistics and saying "we need this ratio".
Even if you're not saying "do this or you're breaking the law" what they're doing is effectively trying to get quotas in through the back door.
There is a mixture of "oh you must be racist if you don't have X percentage" and then a little of "how about if we give you some money if you do X percentage?" and then maybe a bit of "show us how progressive you are by having X percentage".
Fuck your fucking percentages and ratios. That is not how you fix race and gender issues... by mandating BY ANY FUCKING MEANS some sort of ratio.
This doesn't help "people of color" which apparently only applies to black people because asians sure as hell aren't offered any affirmative action. There was that indian guy that wasn't' getting into medical school, then he got a different haircut and lied on his entrance application saying he was black... bam, got right in.
That's fucked up.
This racist bullshit needs to stop. I know what the idiots will say, "it isn't racist if you're biased against people "power"" ... which just means fuck white people and fuck Asians. It is bullshit and you're not going to make people trust the competence of people if everyone knows that X race or Y gender has to be hired at some ratio for SOME reason other than that they were ACTUALLY considered the best candidate for the job.
Furthermore, there is a lot more to diversity then your fucking skin color or whether or not you have a penis. Not all people with one skin color are the same. You can have ten people of all the same race in the same room and have more diversity in that room of THOUGHT than if you had some rainbow of races in the same room. For all you know those 10 people of the same race could have radically different backgrounds, skill sets, philosophies, etc. To say that they're all the same because they all have the same skin color is incredibly offensive and racist. You might as well just walk around saying "all you people look the same to me so I assume you all are the same"... Are you fucking kidding me. Same thing with dicks and vaginas. You are not your dick or your vagina. If I have a room full of 10 dicks or 10 vaginas they could be more diverse in their thoughts, backgrounds, skill sets, philosophies than if we had some 50 50 split.
What group of idiots out there thought that diversity was getting some mix of races and genders? This is a racist's idea of diversity. A non-racist doesn't see race as being relevant. They view who the person actually IS rather than what their skin color is... but a racist just sees "oh that's X race... and you know what they say about those people". THAT is how racists think. And these quotas arrive at a concept of "diversity" by that same logic. they say, well we have these people with these skin tones so obviously we have diversity. What the the actual fuck?
This is easily one of the most disappointing things about politics in the 21st century. The race, gender, and identity politics are beyond toxic. This shit is going to destroy our society.
We all have to see each other as individuals rather than pairing off into arbitrary meaningless racial groups and assuming that "oh I'm with the X race people which is my race so they've obviously got my back"... I can't speak for anyone else, but there are plenty of people in my own race that are utterly intolerable. Why would I reflexively associate with them when most of them are not people I especially relate... and they can't relate to me. I am as likely to find people I relate to in other races as my own. So where is this diversity through skin tone?
If we were shooting a magazine cover or something... I'd get it. You might want to get some people with one skin tone here and another there and who knows what the photographer is doing. But if you're running a business or an education system... WHO THE FUCK CARES.
The worst
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When I went to school in the 80's, both my physics and chemistry teachers had a PhD. I remember my physics teacher deriving the formula for centripetal force on the blackboard from basic concepts, without using calculus. I don't think many of today's teachers would even know where to start.
Where Are the Teachers of Color?
Probably in art schools, teaching things like additive and subtractive synthesis. And judging by the quality of some UIs, especially these made by coders, it is a legitimate question to ask.