That’s been proven time and again all over the country.

In the South Bronx, once top flight public schools in the 1950s became “ghetto schools” by the early 1970s (when the surrounding area became predominatly black) and were among the worst “failing schools” in the NYC public school system at that time.

By the late 1980s as some of those areas became increasingly Asian (Korean & Vietnamese) those schools suddenly “turned around!”

No more money was spent.

Pretty much the same teaching staff.

Same books, etc, etc.

The difference was students from a community that cared about education.

Education isn’t something magical bestowed on children. It’s something earned and worked for, often by an entire family…and the argument that the blacks in those areas didn’t have the time to work with their kids.

Please!

Who has less time than some of these Asian shopkeepers working 18 hours a day, six and seven days a week???

When schools fail, 99 times out of 100, it’s the communities that have failed the kids, NOT the schools.

That’s just a basic fact of life.

One group of Americans that is financially devastated is the group that has fled from the public schools and put their children in private schools to get an education. Americans have paid an enormous price for the failure of education!This notion that two thirds of the country is oblivious or uncaring is obscene.

It is not a question of caring. Americans simply do NOT want to throw more money into the black hole of failure and I think that is eminently reasonable.

First, my statement was a general one. Of course, you may be an exception (although I don’t agree with your rationale for opposing AA). But let’s be honest about one thing, vouchers will never be sufficient to address the educational inequities in this society. So a few students are allowed to benefit from the program. What about the rest? Even if vouchers were available to everyone, the best school is the district certainly could not absorb all the students trying to get in. So the question becomes, how are the voucher students selected for admittance. Vouchers only offer a limited solution. There must be more critical thought given to improving the quality of education at all schools. The solution will and must be multifaceted. Unfortunately, I don’t see on a global level, which only hurts our future.

I don’t even understand that statement (or accusation) to be frank. I support school vouchers as an excellent way to give all kids, regardless of circumstances, a shot at good schooling. That’s hardly the M.O. of someone who wants to keep anyone down.

On the other hand, those often in favor of Affirmative Action have no basis for their support of the policy. Most blindly support the policy because they were told by someone or some group that they needed to support it. The supporters have also failed to provide positive solutions to enhance the ability of all to compete for jobs and admission.

Make no mistake, racism still exists today and will continue until Jesus returns. Constantly talking about racism or Affirmative Action will not change that sad reality. So the question is what do we as Americans do about it? Do we continue a tired debate? Or do we work to remove the basis for Affirmative Action? (Just eliminating the policy does not address the underlying problems).

I say the latter. The education of all citizens should be of paramount importance to all. The routine and basic jobs that don’t require much formal education are being outsourced daily. The jobs remaining in the U.S. will require our kids to have more education. If we want the best future for our kids, we must work together and come up with solutions that matter; not simply rehash canned arguments.

I might humbly suggest that if you are not getting everything you want out of life, it quite possibly has nothing to do with the color of your skin and everything to do with the content of your character.

Fourteen years ago I moved out of Detroit to a upper middle-class suburb. When I moved in, the area was almost 80% white. Now, it’s over 80% Black. Ironically there has been no increase in crime, the schools and student test scores are still above those of the inner city and the property values remain stable. Yet the white’s chose to leave… ”

As a general rule of thumb, one shouldn’t quote CNN or Detroit news, especially for facts, except to point out the MSM’s biases, shortcomings or omissions of truth. Voting pop? Is that 10% of all registered voters or what?

Better to use an authoritive source like the census:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-5.pdf
To wit, Blacks make up 14% of the MI population and 82% of the Detroit population (yeah, the same pop that overwhelmingly voted to give another term to that thug hip-hopper Kwame). Him and his mom, what a racket.

Census.gov and bls.gov are loaded with juicy data, spend some time there and you just might find some eye openers.

So I find it hard to swallow that 70% of the white men who voted against AA were responsible for upending the status quo. Plus, I know of several black Detroit churches that rail against AA, race-victimology and the unhealthy reliance on Uncle Sugar. Do their voices count or are they outcast from the rest of the plantation?

As for pinning the fault for white flight, one may try looking at Mayor Extraodinaire Coleman. Is it any wonder that his unrelenting campaign of race politics provided white Detroiters to get up and git as far away from his jurisdiction?

Watching Detroit for the past 30 years is like watching a train-wreck in excruciatingly slow-motion.

As for your assertion that crime didn’t increase or test scores drop when the population flipped. I think it’s hard to quantify something as worse, when it’s already the murder capital armpit of America.

I think I know whereof I speak, Detroit was heading downhill when I attended public elementary school on the NW side over by Oakman & 12th in the late 60s/early 70s. Back in the day when Longfellow was notorious.

In ‘75, my parents decided to not only put us in private school, but to move us some 80 miles north to Flint. Unfortunately, there is something contagious about race-politics, as Flint descended into it’s own death spiral and is in turn the armpit of MI.

As I see it, it’s all self-inflicted.

Ciao!

Seems like no matter how I try to describe the lack of anything between each line, the terms seem loaded with double-entendres. /shrug.

In any case, it’s not too often that I meet a 1 st gen African-American who has bought into the black victimology, lock, stock & barrel. Must be something to do with keeping it real, whatever that means.

As for Indiongo’s shocking discovery about the low rate of blacks in higher ed, did it ever occur that HS & pre-med grades might be the strongest indicator as to why one might not cut it? I’d sure hate to trust a 2.0 GPA doctor with a life-threatening diagnosis. More so if the below-average doc got the sheepskin based on race and not what’s between the ears. If that’s racist, then so be it.

Redbeard, I assumed all this time that you were speaking in “plain” English, only to discover that you were speaking in “code.” If Idiongo could find all of that meaning in your post, we need to send him on the hunt for Osama, cuz this lad can find anything…

(a ripoff of a joke from AC)

There is a registry that will give you this information by contacting the Arizona Bar Association. You can also get the information by contacting the University of Arizona School of Law. They will also be able to tell you how many blacks are currently enrolled in programs leading to a law degree. It is often more productive to find the telephone number of a contact than it is to piddle around on a web site.

With 108,000 blacks in Arizona who are 18 and older do you find it remarkable that up to a half of one per cent of them might have law degrees?

I suspect that if you look around the upscale areas you will find a fairly sizable number or black lawyers, doctors, dentists, architects, engineers, etc.

The vast majority of people will pay for quality without regard to skin color, place of origin, religion, etc.

The problem, Idiongo, is that you’ve failed to give a single instance of demonstrable direct discrimination.

There are many Civil Service jobs that rely upon standardized exams for entrance level hiring, and other kinds of standardized exams are also used in College admissions.

It CAN be proven that many of these exams have a “disparate impact,” (ie. fewer blacks pass them than other groups), BUT that disparate impact is NOT, in and of itself, proof any deliberate or dircet discrimination.

Moreover, those standadized exams for all those Civil Service jobs were designed to eradicate and earlier and more widespread form of discrimination – nepotism, cronyism and patronage, which existed in many parts of the U.S. until around the 1930s, when it was replaced by “the Merit System” – that phalynx of standardized exams.

Real discrimination cases ARE fairly rare, because it’s rare that a person can forward with demonstrable proof that they’ve been deliberately discriminated against.

Something people should remember is that exam scores are fluid and so are the differences between the various ethnic groups. What exists now is a different picture than what existed twenty years ago and the picture twenty years hence will probably look somewhat different than it does today.

Those who insist on claiming that “disparate impact” = discrimination are not only very wrong, but short-sighted as well.

All those Civil Service exams are open to everyone in any state they’re offered. Some tests are harder than others, but that’s because the standards for some jobs are higher. There’s nothing at all discriminatory about that.

Comment by RedBeard — 12.31.06 @ 10:09 am

I would like to smile based on your posting but this is really serious. I copied those comments from the main page introducing this topic and from the comments of a guy called Tyrone(posting #26).
Lets get one thing right Mr Redbeard.This is not a joke. I will also ignore your insults of asking at which point did anybody attack a black man in the history of the USA. Your question effectively eliminates the fact that there is Racism or Hate Crimes or anything that has to do apparently with discrimination.
You know,there will never be statistics to show the effects of Jealousy or Envy in a society like that of the USA because it can be easily denied just like you have done. We will never be able to get the true statistics of how many Americans hate Arabs since 9/11 because it is a thing of the mind that can be easily denied.
Just because luckily you are not a partaker of the crime/phenomena that has even generated in the history of the USA a movement(The Civil Rights Movement)does not mean that people like Martin Luther King Jnr were following the ravings of their minds that had lost touch with reality.
Let me say this;I would like to move on and believe that everybody in the USA today is treated fairly.Sadly,this is not the case.
It is unfortunate that the mechanisms that were created to minimize the damaging effects of your race attitudes towards others make you feel so bad.Statistics however show that the black race would have been left behind in the gutters if these systems like(Affirmative Action) were not put into place.
Do I like Affirmative action? No.Does it stop people like Redbeard from feigning ignorance and creating more harm and chaos? Yes.

#29 Idiongo apparently has civil rights problems in Arizona.

Comment by Heliotrope — 12.30.06 @ 9:00 pm

My point was;in a state in which discrimination is so entrenched with excuses like “right-to-work state” or “conservativism” would you kick against a movement that suddenly advocated for Affirmative Action? You point at civil rights,I say that it is closely connected to Affirmative Action.
This is not about my needing a black or white lawyer. I don’t care which race represents me in court but how about a court system that has been completely overwhelmed by certain idealogies?
Ask any lawyer in Arizona,establishing a case of discrimination in Arizona is like passing through the eye of a needle.
Also Heliotrope I would like you to show me where you got your statistics that there is “hundreds” of black lawyers in Arizona.
Through the excesses of Affirmative Action Caucasians are now feeling what it is like to be discriminated against and they are lashing out in droves. I hope it will help them to stop discriminating against others in the future too.