Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane flunks again.
October 2nd, 2007
In his column in today’s
For example, sildenafil cialis he points out that black kids would be more likely than white kids to know that “5-O” is inner-city slang for police.
(On the other hand, buy I wonder how many of those kids would know that “5-O” is a reference to Hawaii Five-O, the exceeedingly white-bread cop show set in Hawaii in the 70s? Also, doesn’t everybody know that “5-O” means police?)
I’m not exactly sure what Mr. Kane’s point is.
Does he want standardized tests to have more inner-city-specific questions like “What invisible force makes it possible for the metal detector to find the gat in your backpack” or “Bobby has three bags of crack. If Bobby swallows two bags, how many bags does he have left?”
(Before you call me a racist, aren’t those questions exactly in line with the argument Mr. Kane was making?)
Standardized test creators already do everything they can to scrub bias from their tests.
So unless inner-city culture has discovered that 2+2 doesn’t really equal 4, “cultural bias” is just another excuse that helps perpetuate an inner-city culture of isolation and failure.
Bottom line?
Inner-city kids aren’t failing because of their culture, it’s their culture that’s failing them.
4 Comments Add your own
1. Melinda | October 2nd, 2007 at 11:37 am
The problem with Eugene’s arguement is that no amount of racism, segregation, sexism, agism, etc. changes the fact that there are 4 states of matter or that E=mc squared.
Facts are facts. No amount of liberal hand-wringing changes the laws of physics, the periodic table of elements, or what happened on December 7, 1941.
(Although, knowing the left, they’re probably working on it through any number of their pet projects that my tax dollars pay for.)
2. Tim | October 2nd, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Another problem with Eugene’s argument is the fact that people from other countries and their children are able to much better than American children even though they come from totally different culture. How are they able to do well even though many of them don’t even speak English as their first language? Obviously they have greater cultural differences than the inner city black children. Why is it that there are more Asian Indian medical students in UW-Madison Medical school than black students despite the fact that there are about 40 times as many blacks as Asian Indians in the state of Wisconsin? These are just excuses to justify the failure of inner city people in taking advantage of good educational opportunities. I know that white suburban students will probably have an easier time doing well on standardized tests than inner city children but that is all the reason for them to study hard and get ahead.
3. capper | October 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Please excuse my ingnorance, but what is the fourth state of matter? I am aware of gas, liquid and solid, but not the fourth.
Either way, it is hard to focus on the periodic table, when there are more pressing issues facing you, like wondering if you’ll make it home safely, or even alive. But apparently that’s their problem, and wouldn’t affect you, so who cares, right?
4. Elliot | October 2nd, 2007 at 8:47 pm
The fourth state of matter is plasma.
Melinda’s pretty smart. I’m sort of scared of her. ;)
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