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Wired: IBM's School Could Fix Education and Tech's Diversity Gap
theodp writes: Wired positively gushes over IBM's Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), saying it could fix education and tech's diversity gap. Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology, allowing them to earn a high school diploma and a free associate degree in six years or less. That P-TECH's six inaugural graduates completed the program in four years and were offered jobs with IBM, Wired reports, is "irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work" (others aren't as impressed, although the President is drinking the Kool-Aid). While the program has only actually graduated six students since it was announced in 2010, Wired notes that by fall, 40 schools across the country will be designed in P-TECH's image. IBM backs four of them, but they'll also be run by tech giants like Microsoft and SAP, major energy companies like ConEdison, along with hospital systems, manufacturing associations, and civil engineering trade groups. They go by different names and are geared toward different career paths, but they all follow the IBM playbook.
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas. Every reputable study of marriage and family life has shown that kids from even semi-stable nuclear families tend to be significantly less prone to the pathologies common in the black lower class (where out of wedlock birth is the norm, not exception). Ever deal with white trash (not rednecks, white trash; there is a major difference)? It's the same sociological situation and even the same set of behavior problems and stunted options despite "white privilege."
A large part of the problem is that there is an active segment of society that doesn't want to deal with the moral issues that lead to this situation, denouncing that as "moralizing" and instead wants to focus purely on politics as though it's not all intertwined. Yet those issues are precisely the personal choices, enabled by public policy and culture, that lead to the destruction of the stable nuclear family in much of the black community. Blaming external factors for everything, which is the politically correct solution, is like Josh Duggar attempting to blame porn and Satan for why he graduated from molesting his sisters to serial adultery against his wife.
The issue is most minorities never get the oppertunity to raise to the top. They do not have access to the same sources as everyone else.
Neither does some poor white kid in Appalachia. Is IBM going to give him a job too?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.