Bigotry of Low Expectations
The state of Florida has adjusted its education goals based on race, lowering expectations for most minorities- although not ‘Asians.’ Talk about bigotry.
The goals:
“90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent.”
There are over 26 million ways this is wrong- 26 million and then some being about the population of public schools in FL.
This is a recipe for hostility between Asians and just about everybody else, as there’s no way this can’t foster resentment and the assumption- which will be true, that blacks have been given a pass the Asians didn’t get.
It’s incredibly patronizing, and reeks of the sort of paternalism once used to defend slavery.
One of G. A. Henty’s boy’s books is With Lee in Virginia. Consider the following and tell me just how different it is from the Welfare State’s view of minorities:
“…the slave with a fairly kind master is to
the full as happy as the ordinary English laborer. He certainly does not
work so hard, if he is ill he is carefully attended to, he is well fed,
he has no cares or anxieties whatever, and when old and past work he has
no fear of the workhouse staring him in the face…
“…If an estate were
sold together with all the slaves upon it, there would be no more
hardship in the matter than there is when an estate changes hands in
England, and the laborers upon it work for the new master instead of the
old. Were I to liberate all the slaves on this estate to-morrow and to
send them North, I do not think that they would be in any way benefited
by the change. They would still have to work for their living as they do
now, and being naturally indolent and shiftless would probably fare much
worse.”
Henty’s slave-owner, speaking here, and presumably Henty, believed that blacks were naturally incapable of fending for themselves without extra ‘help’ and care from the slave-owner. They were born that way. Couldn’t help it. They needed the ‘helping hand’ of a slave owner to level the playing field and make sure they weren’t held back by their own natural weaknesses. How is this different from the state deciding that nall blacks cannot possibly manage to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, so the state will just lower expectations accordingly, and issue diplomas for inferior work?
The slave holder is giving advice to his son, and he continues:
Therefore, Vincent, my advice to you is, be always kind to your slaves–not over-indulgent, because they are very like children and indulgence spoils them-
Moreover, much like today’s entitlement system, Henty says that the slaves had learned ” to receive many little kindnesses” at the hands of their ‘patrons.’
Other problems-
The lumping of all Asians together. Contrary to the apparent opinion of the State dep’t of education, All Asians do not look the same- nor are their backgrounds the same. Not all Asian immigrants and their children perform equally well on those standardized tests.
Essentially, this is a tacit admission from the state dept of education that they are flatly refusing to give an equal education to all their students, but particularly to black students.
It’s okay, they are saying, like that failed Barbie doll, “Math is too hard- for you. You can’t do it because of the color of your skin.