16
Part One:
Brown v Board of Education Topeka is the worst Supreme Court decision ever inflicted on the United States of America. No enemy of the United States has ever done more damage to the country than the Supreme Court when it made its ruling on May 17th 1954. Starting at the beginning let's look at who is taking credit for this fiasco.
50 years after integration case, J*ws remember their crucial role By Matthew E. Berger
"In the fight for the rights of African Americans, J*ws were also in a fight for the rights of all minorities in America," Saperstein said. "There
r
was implicit recognition that J*ws wouldn't be safe in America until they created a country with no room for discrimination."
So this is why we have a problem today.
As an associate counsel for the NAACP L
egal Defense Fund, Greenberg was one of several who argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court. He later succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the fund's director and counsel for more than 20 years.
Being Jewish can lead you in any direction, said Greenberg, now a professor at Columbia University's School of Law. Greenberg said he wasn't driven by his religion but more by his upbringing in the socialist Zionist movement of J*ws who had immigrated from Eastern Europe.
We were social activists, he said.
Ba
ck then we'd call them socialists; now you'd call them liberals.
Nope, we call them commies.
But, Greenberg said, not all J*ws were on the good side.
Some of the lawyers in the South who led the opposition were Jewish, he said.
In other words, the fix was in.
But blacks and J*ws have not enjoyed an entire half-century of friendship.
Most significantly, many Jewish organizat
ions broke with black groups in 1978, coming out against the affirmative action po
licies
for which many blacks were fighting. The ADL's leader at the time, Nathan Perlmutter, was one of the leading spokesmen against race-based criteria for admission to colleges and universities.
Leaders of Jewish groups said the rejection of quotas for affirmative action came largely in light of numerical limits on Jewish enrollment in European and American universities in the 1920s.
There's nothing wrong with looking out for your own selfish interests, is there? Is it terribly wrong of me to look out for my own interests, the interests of my family and the interests of White people in general?
Instead of gloating over how you Jewish people helped destroy one of the best public education systems in the world, you should be apologizing. I do not see where taking credit for such a disastrous social policy is going to make you any friends or win you any fame after the facts are known. I will say th
is, what
you did,
you did without the force of arms and you did it in a legal, civilized manner. Nevertheless, it was the wrong thing to do.
In this series I intend to show that the negro is ineducable. I am going to show that Brown v Board never accomplished what it set out to do, wasted billions of dollars, and achieved little to nothing for the effort.
Brown v Board was bad enough, but there are worse federal dictates.
SWANN V. CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG BOARD OF EDUC decided April 20, 1971, brought busing, but it also gave us statistics. It is impossible to find racial statistics prior to 1971. Because of the gap in statistics between 1954 and 1971, negroes have a 17 year head start before they are judged by the people whose lives were disrupted whose taxes were used to fund this boondoggle.
In education, reading is fundamental. One must be able to read well to understand the academic subjects taught in schools. Read
ing is taught
in ev
ery grade in every year from kindergarten through the 12th grade. Reading is that important.
Let's examine reading scale scores for selected years between 1971 and 1999.
A scale score ranks everybody on the same scale. We can use scale scores to compare different years, different age groups, and different racial groups.
Average reading scale scores, by race/ethnicity and age: 1971-99
Allow me to make a few observations.
In 1999 White 13 year olds were three points above Black 17 year olds in reading. Bad as that is, this is worse. In the 28 years between 1971 and 1999, Black 17 year olds in 1999 had only gained 3 points on White 13 years olds in 1971. 28 long years yields three lousy points. Sure, back in 1971 White 13 year olds had a
22 point lead on
Black 17 year olds, but remember, we are still comparing White 13 year olds to Black 17 y
ear olds 45 years after Brown v Board.
Second only to reading, math is also an important subject taught in schools.
Average mathematics scale scores, by race/ethnicity and age: 1973-99
In 1999, in math, Black 17 year olds had an equal average scale score to White 13 year olds. Looking for something good to say about blacks, I have to notice that in 1973 Black 17 year olds lagged White 13 year olds by four points and in 1999 Black 17 year olds had surpassed the White 13 year olds in 1973 by nine points, an impressive gain over 26 years but one should expect impressive gains like that 45 years after Brown v Board.
Science is what drives our modern world.
Average science scale scores, by race/ethnicity and age: 1977-99
http://nces.ed.gov/Pubs2003/Hispanics/figure
s/4_4a.gif
The lowest average scale score for 13 year old Whites in science was 256 in 1977. Black 17 year olds tied that score in 1992 and beat that score in 1994 and 1996.
It is worth mentioning that in 1977, White 13 year olds lead the 1999 Black 17 year olds' score by 2 points. In 1999 White 13 year olds lead Black 17 year olds by 12 points, 45 years after Brown v Board, 28 years after SWANN V. CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG, in other words, after 28 years of busing for racial integration, this is what we celebrate.
As the world becomes smaller, geography becomes more important.
Table 13-2 Average geography scale scor
e of 4th-, 8th-, and 12th
-graders, by selected student and school characteristics: 2001
In 2001 White 8th graders lead Black 12th graders by 13 points in geography. Negroes prefer to be called African Americans. They talk
about celebrating their rich African roots but I don't think more than one twentieth of all adult negroes could find Africa on a globe or map.
Every citizen should be well versed in the history of his country.
Table 14-2 Average U.S. history scale score of 4th-, 8th-, and 12th-graders, by selected student and school characteristics: 2001
White 8th graders beat Black 12th graders in American history by two points in 2001,
47 years after Brown v Board.
In all of theses cases I've presented, it is obvious that Blacks trail Whites in academics by at least four years, furthermore, they always have.
As recently as May 13, 2004,
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education published this article.
Bad news: A new report from the Department of Education shows a persistent and growing gap between
blacks and whites in high school grade point averages. The report, entitled The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricular and Achievement, 1990-2000, documents that in 1990 the mean high school grade point average for black high school graduates was 2.43. But over the next decade the mean grade point average for black high school graduates had improved to
2.63.
For white high scho
ol graduates in 1990, the mean grade point average was 2.73, or 0.30 higher than the GPA of blacks who had earned their high school diplomas. By 2000 the mean white GPA was 3.01. This is 0.38 points higher than the mean GPA for blacks.
Education Department Report Shows Increase in Black-White Grade Point Average Gap for High School Graduates
At this point, one has to wonder if you were to take 1000 Black 12 graders and 1000 white 8th graders at random and enroll them into a various community colleges across America,
which group would outperform the other. There is no doubt in my mind that White 8th graders would leave the 12th grade Blacks in the dust because White 8th graders are not only better prepared academically, but they have a better work ethic and better manners than Black 12th graders
.
If colleges are matriculat
ing Black 12th graders through Affirmative Action why is there no outcry to let academically equivalent Whites matriculate to these same colleges and universities as well. After all, the academic background is the same for both White 8th graders and Black 12th graders, on paper, anyway. When a university or college admits the 'average' Black, they are admitting a student who less educated and less prepared than the 'average' White 9th grader, the average White 10th grader, the average White 11th grader and the average White 12th grader. These universities are picking Blacks over vastly more qualified Whites and in most cases vastly younger Whites as well. This is wrong, very wrong. I
t is a terrible waste of a limited resource. Seats at colleges and universities do not grow on trees. A person's race shouldn't be a barrier to obtaining an education but neither should a person's age.
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the decision of the unanimous Court:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does...We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š
[url
=http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrigh
ts/brown.html]Brown v. Bo
ard of Education[/url]
It is too bad that Chief Justice Earl Warren didn't have a crystal ball to gaze into the future. Remember that in 1954 there were no education statistics available. It was assumed that negroes were basically the same as whites except for their skin color and hair texture, that the reason negroes performed poorly was because they had been discriminated against their whole lives.
In 1994, 40 years after Brown v Board, 24 years after Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement published a document titled
THE EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS OF BLACK STUDENTS. Here are some of the finding.
Bla
ck children start elementary school with less preschool experience than white children, and a gap in preschool enrollment rates has developed.
Gaps in
the academic performance of black and white students appear as early as age 9 and persist through age 17.
At age 17, NAEP scores again indicate a large black-white achievement gap, although test scores for blacks have improved relative to those of whites in reading, mathematics, and science since
the early 1970s. In 1971, average reading proficiency
among 17-year-old blacks was well below that of 17-year-old whites and even well below that of 13-year-old whites; in 1992, the proficiency of 17-year-old blacks was about the same as that of 13-year-old whites.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š The black-white achievement gap has closed somewhat over time, persisting, although not widening, with age. The blackwhite differences in mathematics at ages 9, 13, and 17 are remarkably similar.
In 2003, 49 years after Brown, 32 years after Swann, the National Center for Education Statistics published
Status and Trends in the Education of Blacks. This is a
very long and all inclusive report full of graphs and charts that not only deals with negro academic failures but also dabbles in several aspects of the negro lifestyle.
Four family background factors that are commonly used to measure risks to children's future academic and socioeconomic outcomes are: having a mother who has less than a high school education (see Indicator 5.2), living in a family on welfare or receiving food stamps, living in a single-parent family, and having parents whose primary language is a language other than English.27 The early reading and mathematics skills of children with at least one of these risk factors tend to be lower than those of children with no risk factors, and children with 2 risk factors fare less well than children with one risk factor.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š These risk factors are considerably more common among kindergartners from racial/ethnic minorities than among kindergartners from White families.
In 1998, 71 percent of entering kindergartners from Black or Hispa
nic families had one or more risk factors, compared to 29 pe
rcent of those from White families
and 61 percent from As
ian families. The percentage of first-time kindergartners with two or more risk factors was four times greater for Blacks (27 percent) and five times greater for Hispanics (33 percent) than for their White peers (6 percent). Seventeen percent of Asian first-time kindergartners had two or more risk factors.
From this report we are told the truth about negro retardation.
Black students are more likely than Whites, Hispanics, or Asians/Pacific Islanders to receive special education services.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) helps children with disabilities receive special education.15 In the 1999-2000 school year, 13 percent of all children 3 to 21 years old rece
ived services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education A
ct (IDEA). Theâ┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š proportions of Black and American Indian students served (15 and 14 percent, respective
ly) are higher than the proportions of White, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander students served by IDEA. Similar percentages of White and Hispanic students received special education services (11 percent), while 6 percent of all Asian/Pacific Islander students received these services.
In an article titled
Racial Inequity in Special Education by Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield published by the Harvard Education Publishing Group we find this statement.
Despite these improvements, the benefits
of special education have not been equitably distributed. Minority ch
ildren with disabilities all too often experience inadequate services, low-quality curriculum and instruction, and unnecessary isolation from their nondisabled peers. Moreover, inappropriate practices in both general and special education classrooms have resulted in overrepresentation, misclassification, and hardship for minority students, particularly black
children.
A flood of concerns expressed by community leaders about minority children being misplaced in special education prompted The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University to commission the research for this book. Since the early 1970s, national surveys by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education have revealed persistent overrepresentation of minority children in certain disability categories.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š The most pronounced disparities then were black children who, while only 16 percent of the total school enrollment, represented 38 percent of the stu
dents in classes for the educationally mentally retarded.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š After more tha
n twenty years, black children constitute 17 percent of the total school enrollment and 33 percent of those labeled mentally retarded-only a marginal improvement.â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š During this same period, however, disproportionality in the area of emotional disturbance (ED) and the rate of identification for both ED and specific learning disabilities (SLD) grew si
gnificantly for blacks.
But are Black children overrepresented and misclassified? In a 2000 La Griffe du Lion article titled
THE POLITICS OF MENTAL RETARDATION: A TAIL OF THE BELL CURVE we find this gem.
With the development of the IQ test by Alfr
ed Binet in 1905, it became possible to quantify intellectual shortcomings. T
he test dramatically altered methods of diagnosis and classification, and soon became the principal tool for diagnosing mental retardation. By mid-century two of the three criteria for defining mental retardation, cognitive deficiency and age of onset, could be accurately determined, but the assessment of adaptive behavior relied largely on subjective evaluation. Today, the assessment of adaptive behavior still remains fuzzy enough for the diversicrat to work his miracles.
â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š In 1959, AAMD set the IQ threshold for mental retardation at < 85. The civil rights movement of the next decade force
d psychologists to rethink this boundary, because half the African American population fell below it. In 1973, responding to this concern, AAMD (by then AAMR) changed the threshold for retardation from IQ < 85 to IQ < 70. The boundary moved south by one standard deviation! The proportion of blacks below the threshold instan
tly dropped from about 50 percent to 12 percent. Subsequent refinements made it s
till more difficult to meet the criteria for retardation.
â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š When Binet in 1905 produced the first IQ test, it promised to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of mental retardation. A half century later it came under attack for reasons Binet could not have imagined. Could any of the pioneer psychometricians have foreseen Larry P. v. Riles (1979), a California class-action suit that focused on IQ testing of young black children? The court held that IQ tests were not valid for African Americans. It banned California from using the tests for placing black students in classes for the "educa
ble mentally retarded" or equivalent categories on the grounds that the tests were biased. After a series of appeals, the district court ruled that no special education related purposes exist for which IQ tests could be administered to black pupils. Though only a California ruling, the case began a political assault on st
andardized testing that has spread beyond the IQ test to college entrance exams, prom
otional exams and more.
In the same article La Griffe du Lion examines a civil rights investigation in five Maryland school districts.
A Case History of Government Intervention
â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�šÃ”š In 1996, The Office for Civil Rights placed 16 school districts nationwide under review for potential discrimination. The districts were charged with violating the civil rights of minorities, especially African Americans, because blacks were found to be overrepresented in special education programs, especially those for the mentally retarded. Five of the 16 districts were in Maryland. Ironica
lly, Maryland is a very liberal state very much in tune with the goals of the Civil Right
s Office. Maryland is also almost 30 percent black. The offending districts included Balt
imore, Howard, Harford, Montgomery and Prince Georges counties.
La Griffe du Lion demonstrates that Maryland did not discriminate against those poor retarded negroes.
From Table 2 we note that the ratio of black to white retarded children is in the expected range for two of the five cited counties, Baltimore and Howard. In two others, Harford and Montgomery, the ratio is only slightly out of bounds. In Prince Georges County the B/W ratio is lower, but still not egregiously so. We safely conclude that the five Maryland school districts did not discriminate against blacks, and that administrators and staff mostly did their jobs conscientiously. <!--QuoteEnd
--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Earl Warren said separa
te educational facilities are inherently unequal. That may or may not
be true but one thing is certain, negroes are inherently unequal to whites and all the other races and ethnic groups.
National Education Statistics & Other Equity Indicators
