You Had To See This One Coming

Instapundit linked to an article today about increasing violence in St. Paul, MN high schools. That article linked to an essay by a teacher which went into greater detail. Here are the payoff paragraphs for me.

There students are out of control and illiteracy is the norm.

On a daily basis, I saw students cussing at their teachers, running out of class, yelling and screaming in the halls, and fighting. If I had a dollar for every time my class was interrupted by a student running into my room and yelling, I’d be a rich man. It was obvious to me that these behaviors were affecting learning, so when I saw the abysmal test scores this summer, I was not surprised. Out of 375 students, only 14.3 percent were proficient in Reading, 9.6 percent in Math and 9.3 percent in Science.

The school administration is fudging the numbers they report.

I diligently collected data on the behaviors that I saw in our school and completed behavior referrals for the assaults. These referrals were not accurately collected. The school suspended some students, but many more assaults were ignored or questioned by administrators to the point where the assaults were not even documented. I have since learned that this tactic is widely used throughout the district to keep the numbers of referrals and suspensions low.

Racism gets the blame.

I blame the San Francisco-based consulting firm, Pacific Education Group (PEG). PEG was hired by SPPS in 2010 to help close the achievement gap. PEG makes no secret of the fact that its prescription for closing the gap is based on the Critical Race Theory. This theory argues that racism is so ingrained in the American way of life — its economy, schools, and government — that things must be made unequal in order to compensate for that racism. PEG pushes the idea that black students are victims of white school policies that make it difficult or impossible for them to learn. So, when a black student is disruptive, PEG, as I see it, stresses that it’s not their fault, and the student should just take a break, and then return to class shortly thereafter.

The author is black in case you were wondering.

None of this is a surprise to me. I figured it had to be this way, given the destruction of the traditional family. The rot is bigger and worse than we've been told. Way bigger and way worse.

Anyone want to take a crack at teaching remedial English and Math to about 320 students? Anyone want to guess at how much these illiterates will earn when they leave school? Do you think this is an isolated incident?