Good for them for the change, but I do dislike naming things for people who are still alive. It’s unseemly. Surely there is a figure who is no longer alive that they could find inspiring.
I suppose the magnate school thing is a separate topic of conversation. A lot can be said about the particulars of the education system in the US.
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Most people don’t, but that’s the legacy of 140 years of systematic disenfranchisement (and counting). Mississippi has the largest proportion of African-Americans in the country, and votes Democratic in nearly identical numbers, for the obvious reasons. If there were a white swing vote to speak of, it’d be a purple state. And believe it or not, there will be a white swing vote to speak of before the next political generation is over.
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A “miss”. It’s in the very name of their state.
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Jackson has a new, recently elected mayor. He’s one of Sanders’ Our Revolution group of candidates. There are islands of blue in the deep red states, and some purple islands getting bluer each election cycle. Breaking gerrymandering is the key to releasing us all from the Tyranny of the Minority (republicans).
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A major problem is that for a long, long time, the losers of the US Civil War actually did write the history. Hence all the Lost Cause bullshit, and talk about how it was about States Rights, and so on and on and on.
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If you’re avoiding torches, pitchforks, and genocidal rhetoric - don’t sweat it. The only one likely to mistake you for one, is one. They’re the one’s who will put you in a box, metaphorically, or you know, maybe literally.
and an Obama mamas sing along!
and they can sell banana Fanta!
Well, I mean, it was about states rights. They just think that somehow that’s different from states rights to enslave black people and push around the north and force them into enforcing barbaric southern laws.
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They also say bless your heart when they mean a different part of your anatomy and a whole other kind of verb entirely.
History is not written by the whiners or the noosers.
So you believe there should be no tracking whatsoever in schools? That the brightest must learn at the pace of the least gifted? That’s a terrific way to make smart kids hate school. My kids attend(ed) a test-in district run (not charter) magnet that is >90% nonwhite. Similar to the renowned Stuyvesant & Bronx Science of NYC. It provides a tremendous opportunity for disadvantaged kids to get a great college preparation rather than being bored, or worse, terrified, in their local HS.
It’s neither private nor a charter from what I can tell. It’s a public district magnet school taking gifted kids. Same as traditional tracking but moving the kids to a different school.
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Have you stopped beating your wife?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
And thus you, like me, have become complicit in the system that denies resources to those who need it most, in order to lavish extra attention on those who need it least.
By the way, have you stopped beating your wife?
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I don’t think he’s arguing that. It looks like he’s just conflating “privileged” with “gifted”, leading to you debating past each-other. Obviously, there are gifted kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds (who are served by magnet and speciality public schools) as well as kids who aren’t gifted who come from privileged backgrounds (who are likely served by well-funded suburban schools for non-gifted kids). I’ve seen no evidence that magnet schools get extra funding.
The core problem in American public K-12 education isn’t tracking (if anything more tracking is needed) or magnet schools (again, more please – the NYC model is wonderful) but rather the property-tax-based funding structure for local districts. Funding should really be pooled at the state level and then distributed back down to the local districts and magnet schools on an equitable per-capita basis.
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What leads you to believe extra resources are spent at a magnet school? If anything, at ours they have less. They don’t even cherry pick the teachers, like they did for the honors classes at my HS, some of them are mediocre. All they really have a is a concentration of the best students being offered only Honors and AP classes. You clearly indicated that magnet schools (a form of tracking) are evil, then imply my question is unfair. Your position is unclear then.
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Magnet schools aren’t a form of tracking. They are a form of segregation. The principals of those schools call it “skimming the cream off the top”.
The kids who go to magnet schools are privileged. Their parents aren’t leaving their education to chance, the kids aren’t suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome or malnutrition, and their parents are literate enough to know how to get into the school. The magnet kids are purposely taken out of the mainstream and kept away from kids with less advantages.
And as far as cherry picking the teachers, c’mon, do you believe that the best teachers are in the magnet schools or the comprehensive schools? The same people aren’t applying to teach in both places. The magnet schools get a better selection, because while there are rare exceptions, sure, for the most part the best teachers get offered multiple placements, so they choose places where they will have the most rewarding students. That means the students with educated parents with computers and books in the home - magnet and charter students.
And by the way the whole test thing is a complete sham. In real life, you get in by test or by recommendation from a teacher, principal, or politician - or by having a sibling in the school. This is true even in schools where they say it’s not true (or at least in my state it is) and it’s right there in the Davis/Obama school applications I linked.
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In the suburban HS I went to with a class of 600, there were basically 60 kids in “honors” classes who were segregated for all intents and purposes. I don’t see a major difference, except that by concentrating them you can offer more AP classes. I would understand your “segregation” position if this tracking resulted in, say, a majority white school in a predominantly minority district. That’s not the case, at least here. I suppose you could make that case for Stuyvesant, which is >70 Asian in a city predominantly Black & Hispanic.
In our district they go where they’re assigned, not where they apply.
Maybe where you are, here people would riot. For our school they give the PSAT in the fall of 8th grade, and it’s weighted with grades and recommendations. The NYC magnets use their own test. Not all magnet schools use tests, and not all are desirable. NYC created a bunch of specialty schools and there’s great variation in them. And neither system to my knowledge “sibs” kids in, the NYC k-8 “gifted and talented” program used to, but was shut down, and rightly so.
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Even worse, letting your students choose the name. In that way lies Justin Bieber Middle School.
The easy solution is just to change the referent instead of the name. For example, you could decree that the school would henceforth be named after Al “Bummy” Davis, or Warwick Davis, or Miles Davis. Of course, there’s also the linguistically ambiguous Sammy Davis Jr. High.
i think we going to do the former AND recognize rather than ignore the latter. We can do both, we’re all complex human beings here.
Do you do it often anyhow? 
Yup. My thoughts on hearing that the overwhelmingly african american school population suggested, then voted this into being was “HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! Soooooo Fucking AWESOME! Everyone (especially a bunch of african american kids) deserves to not have to go to a school named after a pro-slavery asshole, but to have re-named it after a current political figure that was/is an inspiration to them? And who so happens to have been demonized as a foreign born muslim? HA HA HA HA HA!!! That is so the perfect move to stick it to the Alt-reich crew!”
Kids of Barack Obama Magnet International Baccalaureate Elementary, you win!
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