Bracey in HuffPo: “If Gates is so rich, why ain’t he smart?”
Really worth reading Gerald Bracey’s smack down of Bill Gates in today’s Huffington Post.
But Gates is at it again. Saying really dumb things. This time in the September 23 edition of Parade. I don’t generally read Parade because I think it is generally garbage and it has a long history of saying nasty and erroneous things about public schools. But my wife peruses it and I had to listen to her read out loud the very short piece that is not headed with a by-line. I suppose the author was embarrassed.
Skip the NAEP scores. What about this data?
I’m taking a NAEP nap. Now that the NAEP scores have been released today, all the educational pundits are arguing if the two point rise here or the three point difference here means NCLB is working or not working and on and on and …
You can read much more important data that appeared in the Chicago Tribune today:
Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America’s public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.__In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.__In 21 states — Illinois among them — that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.__No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.
How do you bridge the achievement gap if black students are being pushed out of schools in record numbers?
