Our TKC BLOG COMMUNITY was FIRST to note community complaints against Southwest and their charter school scheme to move all of the minorities out of Brookside/Waldo . . .
Now the newspaper does a more formal write-up today . . .
Plan to remake former Southwest High School comes with big questions for Kansas City
"But there is a downside — a large challenge — awaiting Kansas City Public Schools if it adopts its proposal to create a selective-admission international high school with the Academie Lafayette charter school.
"It’s the same burden that saddles the many urban school districts across the nation that have established exam-entry elite schools . . .What of the schools that would lose more of their top students to a second elite school?"
Funny . . . That's not the burden at all.
Here's the rub . . .
WHAT'S THE KCPS GONNA DO WHEN MORE COMMUNITY COMPLAINTS START CIRCULATING ABOUT AN ALL-WHITE AND BASICALLY SEGREGATED SCHOOL IN WALDO/BROOKSIDE?!?!?
In this instance you can't hide behind test scores or selective admission or any other fantasy . . .
Moreover . . .
"SELECTIVE" IS JUST A CODE WORD.
Like it or not, the reality of what's happening is that the minority students are being moved out AND the complaints against this process/partnership are just getting started.
Developing . . .
Send those " troubled negro students" over to Derrick Thomas Academy. They will receive a curriculum that can be utilized for the remainder of their lives.
ReplyDeleteCar Jacking 101
Stripper Tipping 101 and 102
Cheap Drink for Strippers 101
How to hire a "black driver"
How do drive defensively on slick roads 101
How to father 19 kids and not pay for them
How to sign multi million dollar sports contracts and die broke.
Yep....Derrick Thomas Academy.....where "moon crickets" go to become leaders of tomorrow's "Hood".
Who, at this late date gives a shit? Quit bullshitting yourself, if blacks are kept out of South West HS then the improvement in test scores will be just as dramatic is the reduction in rapes.
ReplyDeleteShut the fuck up.
I was a teacher some time back.
ReplyDeleteOnce when I was in high school, I annoyed my conservative parents by asking a cute Hispanic girl to a dance. I knew this would bother them, but I never understood why. They had occasionally given me vague hints to find a mate of my own race so as to “keep my heritage white.” However, they failed to explain exactly what that meant, or why it was important. Perhaps they took too much for granted. They had spent most of their lives in white towns and I also grew up mostly among white people.
In my younger days, my libertarian views clouded my understanding of race, which I thought was a corrupt, collectivist concept. To add to the confusion, my mainstream, 1980s Christian upbringing had taught me always to look past the surface and into the heart–a teaching I interpreted too broadly. I had a self-righteous moral universalism that was sometimes openly hostile to the values of my own parents. In my arrogance, I saw my elders much the way Michelle Obama sees older white people: as misinformed throwbacks who needed to be enlightened by young people.
Libertarian novelist Ayn Rand called racism “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”
This was my view of race throughout my college years, but what happened after graduation changed all that. The shock of making a living in a large, multiracial city shattered my race-denying idealism and set me on the path to truth.
I had a liberal arts degree and little interest in graduate school, so I made ends meet by working as a security guard and as a substitute teacher. When I was growing up I had a few black and Hispanic friends, but my background sheltered me from the madness that is the majority-minority high school. I learned more about race in one semester of substitute teaching than I did in all of my formal education. Nothing could have prepared me for that.
Certainly, the one-day orientation class I got from the school district didn’t prepare me. We covered very basic policies and procedures, and I thought it odd that I didn’t learn anything that suggested I was actually supposed to teach.
The first thing I found out was that the only schools that ever seemed to need substitutes were ones with many non-Asian minorities, and I quickly learned why there were so many teacher absences: The students literally ran riot. At one campus, especially, black and Hispanic students constantly roamed the halls. That was actually preferable, because trying to corral them inside classrooms only amplified the chaos. I was constantly on the phone with security guards to ask them to remove unruly students.
ReplyDeleteWhen I wondered what my parents may have meant by “white heritage” I thought of the old proverb, “Silence is golden.” Black students, in particular, always shouted. This was intimidating because they hollered so loudly and so frequently that I couldn’t tell if they were happy or on the verge of violence. They shouted in class, in the halls, outside–everywhere, and often for no reason at all. Since there was no way I could teach in that environment, I came to see myself as more of a custodian than a teacher.
I learned to pick my battles. One morning, when I ordered an obese Hispanic drifter, who had been banging on doors, to get out of the hall and return to class, he roared back, “I will f***ing kill you!” He had an enormous physical presence, so if he was capable of violence he could be dangerous. I wanted to know who he was, and report him to the authorities if necessary, so I went back to my room and asked if anyone knew his name. No one said a word. Later, I spoke with another Hispanic student whom I had caught selling prescription pills during class. I told him I would not report his drug selling if he told me the name of the student who had
Drugs were everywhere. During one class when I was showing a video, a Hispanic student directly in front of my desk took out a bag of marijuana and casually began breaking the buds apart. It was common for students to come to class on drugs, but one black girl was so high she literally staggered around the room for the entire period, climbing onto desks and staring at the lights. When I spoke to her she was completely unresponsive.
ReplyDeleteBlack and Hispanic students are keenly aware of the power they have over whites. One day, I was trying to keep order in class when an indeterminate mestizo or mulatto began walking around the room hollering. I asked him to return to his seat and stop bothering others. Instead, he ran out the door and returned moments later with a black female security guard.
“Miss, this dude is a racist,” he declared with a smirk. She shot me a suspicious glance. I was forced to explain myself to the security guard, as if I had been the one who was out of line.
The most frequent assignments I received as a substitute teacher were to so-called “special education” classes. At first I thought I would be comfortable in them, since I had been around people with Down’s Syndrome, autism, and other developmental problems. Generally, people with these conditions are sweet and gentle.
The first time I got a special-education assignment at a majority-minority high school, I was shocked to find that none of the students showed any of the symptoms I was expecting. They were like the other poorly behaved minority students, only worse. During a conversation with one “special needs” student, I asked him why the class was filled with people who seemed to suffer from no disorder other than a lack of discipline. He said students voluntarily had themselves classified as having “special needs” because that exempted them from state-mandated standardized testing. I asked if he didn’t mind being thought of as having a mental problem. He said it didn’t bother him so long as he could advance to the next grade without taking the standardized test. The schools probably encourage this so as to keep the worst students out of the school evaluations required by the No Child Left Behind law. Whatever the case, the students and their families seemed perfectly content with this arrangement.
In another special needs class that was mostly black and Hispanic, I had an Asian student who was so loud and disruptive I had to have him removed from class by security. He returned with a teacher’s aide who told me that the administration did not like having special needs students written up for discipline issues. She would not explain why. Maybe the schools are under pressure not to have a higher rate of discipline problems for minorities and special needs students–even though they cause a hugely disproportionate amount of trouble.
ReplyDelete“But what about when these kids go out and try to find a job?” I asked the aide. “When are they going to be prepared for the real world?” Instead of replying, she went up to the boy and put her arm around him affectionately–like a mother hen with her chick–as he continued his foul-mouthed tirade.
In my semester of substitute teaching, I was assigned twice to a middle-class school in a better part of town. I knew that most of the students were white, but by that point, I had become so jaded I expected more of what I had found on the other side of town.
I was wrong. The students were incredibly polite. They addressed me as “Sir” or “Mister Gustafson.” They paid attention and asked questions that showed genuine interest in the subject matter. On the two occasions I caught people violating the rules, they apologized and immediately corrected their behavior. This school was not all white, and the few minority students reminded me of my non-white friends when I was young.
I had a friend who was also a substitute teacher, and he told me about a conversation he had with a full-time teacher about the difference between good and bad schools. Since he is a classic liberal, he wanted to know if the district spent more money on majority-white schools. He learned that the worst minority schools got about three times as much money per student as majority-white schools, but that a lot of the money went into such things as English as a Second Language, security guards, and daycare for students’ children.
What I saw as a substitute teacher completely changed my views. I began to read more on race and education. Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that people were writing about their experiences, and that many of them matched my own. I gradually reached several conclusions:
ReplyDeleteFirst, my earlier, mostly positive experiences with minorities in a majority-white setting were useless for predicting how non-whites behave when they are the majority. I began to worry about mass immigration, because I could no longer ignore what happens to a neighborhood, a school, a city, or a nation when it becomes majority non-white.
Second, I realized that this country does not have an education problem; it has a race problem. It isn’t enough to teach a child reading, writing, and arithmetic. The student has to believe there is value in what he is being taught. Studies suggest–and my observations bore this out–that blacks tend to be more prone to impulsive behavior and immediate gratification, and less likely to invest in education. Yet we babble on about the virtues of diversity, spending untold amounts of money with the unstated and impossible goal of making minorities act more like whites.
Finally, my experience helped me understand what my parents may have meant by “white heritage” all those years ago. Although the Hispanic girl I took to the dance was not the sort of Hispanic I encountered as a substitute teacher, my experience made me aware of the advantages white folks take for granted–so long as we continue to enjoy majority white schools, communities, states, and nations. We accept displacement at our peril.
JHC, go back to security gaurding, or whatever you want to call it.
ReplyDeleteFace it, we need another world war to wipe out the excess 20%. I say we attack China before they attack us. It will mean no more wally world, but will that be such a bad thing? We could turn them over to Japan for comfort women...
I'd like to see the inside of SW. What happened to the planetarium and other necessaties that Benson and the school board had to have during that time? I would guess everything is torn to shit, boarded over or just plain stolen.
ReplyDeleteIn short: Your property taxes are going up again and you aren't going to see a damn thing for it.
ReplyDelete8:02-8:04: I don't know what era you're talking about, but I did substitute teaching in around 1969-71 in another city that was just coming out of the segregation era. Others were afraid to go to the black schools, but I needed the money, so I went. What I saw surprised me. These were kids eager to learn and well-disciplined. (The white schools in the wealthier areas were disasters--there was a lot of drug use in those days, and those kids had the money and access to drugs; I began choosing to be assigned to the poorer areas of town.) I, too, was liberal and thought segregation was bad, but, given what's happened both to education and the public schools since then, I'm beginning to think perhaps it wasn't that bad, after all.
ReplyDeleteThat said, what is wrong with allowing Southwest to be selective about whom to admit? Form my own experience in the way back days, I know there are black children who want to learn and black families who want their kids to learn. Why must everything be reduced to the lowest common denominator? And why force children of any race into an environment where discipline is not a given?
9:03
ReplyDeleteYeah, except for the rapes, assaults and mob violence that takes place all year long (The cops were called to South West over 300 times a school year.), what's not to like?
Guess what Pollyanna, there is an ongoing violent theme to most if not all urban schools and it is not, NOT "reduced to the lowest common demoninator" it already IS the lowest common demoninator and your "reduction" is in no way relevant, because it is in no way needed.
The entrance exams are necessary to keep the quality of the (possible) high school at the same level as Academy Lafayette - there would be no sense in admitting non-academic performing students or students who had no actual desire to learn.
ReplyDelete9:09: I'm not sure what your point is or if you actually read the post at 9:03.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if Southwest were to admit only students who passed an entrance exam, the pupils (not students and certainly not "scholars") who commit rapes, assaults and mob violence would not be going to Southwest. Of course, we could just continue to do nothing, which is what you seem to be recommending.
Liberals getting tired of paying for private school and don't want to associate with minorities who have no manners because liberal social policies have destroyed the black family and created this dependent uneducated under class?
ReplyDeleteIf test scores mean as much as you Simple Simons think for these youngsters, why aren't you testing these dumb ass officials you keep re-electing year after year in this city. Zero growth in population in 43 years is what I calculate. Test the leaders you elect, and test your stupid ass selves.
ReplyDeleteOnce again KCPS is trying to turn SW High School back into a decent school. The plan now is to make it charter school called the Academy Lafayette and requiring exams for admission and make admission “selective” and the use of this words has the local African-American trouble makers in a hissy fit because they feel the word is a racists word. The Left, who tells the grifters, reverends, bishops and other corrupt leaders of the African-American community what to think, calls these racist code words, or their new term that they recently coined: dog whistle words. An example of dog whistle words that white racists use are:
ReplyDelete• Standards
• Discipline
• Motivation
• Achievement
• Skills
The only way the rehabilitation of SWHS will work is to remove the pathological urban student from it by having a selective admissions policy based on a test is a start. The main objection to this school is that it will be all White. If this is the case and there are not enough African-American kids to pass the entrance test, it is not the result of racism but the result of a community and educational system that has let its children down. This is not whitey’s fault but the fault of people with doctor, reverend, bishop or congressman in front of their names. Forty years of Great Society polices “helping” the African-American community has turned it into a waste land and where its children grow up in a pathological culture. Until this pathology is recognized address and reversed, the situation is not going to approve. Yes, I am a racists for bringing this up and the truth is still the truth.
Acadamie Lafayette already has minority students. Just because a person is a minority does not mean he or she cannot pass the tests.
ReplyDeleteWhy not put the Supt office and the school board office in Southwest HS and see if that helps. ( Right in amongst the scholars).
ReplyDeleteBlack kids ruined Southwest. It's plain. It's simple. It's the truth. Why do we have to keep pussyfooting around the subject or sugar-coating it? It's plain as day. It was a great school before they were bussed in from the ghetto and made it their own.
ReplyDeleteNow it's killed and dead, just like the ghetto.
Oh come on. Acadamie Lafayette is already more than half black. I expect the same will go for the new high school.
ReplyDeleteBrookside itself is even looking more inter-racial these days, and it's a good thing, I think. We don't care about color over here, we just want a nice local high school where kids of all colors can feel safe and get a good education.
get out. either hate blacks or go post someplace else.
DeleteThe onky way to achieve a majority white school in kcmo is to teach everything in French, lol.
ReplyDeleteGod help those middle schoolers. They probably read at the level of a visitation 3rd grader.