Kentucky Education Commissioner: "no school in America... will make adequate yearly progress if they have any sort of diversity in their building"

An unintentionally revealing quote from an article in The Courier-Journal:

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said Kentucky schools overall aren't progressing fast enough to meet the rising standards of No Child Left Behind, which requires all schools to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014.

Many schools are falling short because they can't meet the testing standards among their minority, low-income, learning-disabled or limited-English students. If even one group should fail to meet the reading or math goals, then the school is judged to be failing, which Holliday says “isn't fair.”

“By 2014, there will be no school in America that will make adequate yearly progress if they have any sort of diversity in their building,” Holliday said.

At one Louisville school, the Olmsted Academy, the district spent $2 million "to reduce class sizes, add technology and provide more professional development for teachers, many of whom had to reapply for their jobs." But student scores went up only "slightly," and the school will face sanctions under No Child Left Behind this year.

If scores don't improve quickly, it's possible the Olmsted Academy could be closed. That's what happened to Sam Houston High School in Houston, TX, where the school was deemed a failure because a small group of black students underperformed on a state-mandated math exam year after year. The school was only 4% black and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to raise black scores, to no avail. The school was closed, and 2,400 white and Hispanic students had to be relocated.

To fund an increasing amount of remedial instruction for blacks, schools across the country have been closing science labs, dropping French, German, and Latin courses, eliminating honors programs, and leaving high-achieving white and Asian students to fend for themselves.

h/t: whitey333 @stormfront

NY GOP Distances Themselves from Congressional Candidate Endorsed by this Blog

It's being reported that Westchester County Republicans are dropping congressional candidate Jim Russell after allegedly racist quotations from his 2001 essay "The Western Contribution to World History" surfaced on Monday.

I was aware of Russell's past writings when I endorsed his candidacy back in July, and in fact at one time I linked to the offending essay on this blog. I'm re-posting my article from July in full below.


Saturday July 17, 2010
Westchester County Update: Republican Congressional Candidate Jim Russell Vows to "Stop the HUD Steamroller"

Last summer officials in Westchester County agreed to spend more than $50 million "to create affordable housing in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market it to non-whites in the county and in neighboring New York City."

The agreement settled a lawsuit filed against the county by an organization called the Anti-Discrimination Center. County officials had fought the lawsuit for three years, but settled because of what County executive Andrew Spano called "a historic shift of philosophy" by federal housing officials.

What "historic shift in philosophy" was Spano referring to?

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is intent on integrating racially segregated neighborhoods - not just in Westchester County but across the country. Indeed, HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims said that the Westchester County settlement was a first step, and that he hoped it could "serve as a model for building strong, inclusive sustainable communities in suburban areas across the entire United States."

"Strong, inclusive sustainable communities" is liberal-speak for multi-racial neighborhoods that have high rates of violent crime and low levels of civic health. For years the federal government has been tearing down public housing projects in inner cities and giving the displaced residents Section 8 vouchers that allow them to rent housing in upscale suburban neighborhoods. According to a 2008 article in The Atlantic, police have discovered there is a "near-perfect" match between Section 8 rentals and incidents of violent crime. And in what was the largest study ever conducted on civic engagement in America, Robert Putnam, a liberal Harvard University professor, found that "all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings." Specifically, Putnam found that "the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings."

Westchester's incumbent Congresswoman, Democrat Nita Lowey, supported the settlement, but Lowey's 2010 Republican challenger, Jim Russell, came out strongly against it.

Russell recognizes that "HUD has an insatiable desire to reconfigure neighborhoods across America" and understands that the settlement it forced on Westchester County will "lead to the irreversible demise" of the county. If elected, Russell vows to introduce legislation that will amend federal housing laws to "stop the HUD steamroller" and let "natural housing patterns" endure.

Russell gets it. He understands the danger posed by HUD and groups like the Anti-Discrimination Center, and he's willing to do what it takes to save Westchester County (and all other communities across the country that HUD is intent on "reconfiguring"). He deserves our support.


Jim Russell, the Republican challenger in New York's 18th Congressional district race.

Black and White Dolls

Back in March, a Walmart store in Louisiana made headlines when it priced a discontinued black Barbie doll less than a similar white Barbie doll. ABC News quoted a Harlem community organizer who said Walmart was "devaluing the black doll" and a sociology professor from California who said that Walmart was sending a message that they "value blackness less than whiteness."

Now a Target store in Florida is in the news for pricing a discontinued white doll less than a similar black doll. Is Target being accused of "devaluing the white doll" and "valuing whiteness less than blackness"?

No, of course not.

Instead, Target is being accused of racism against blacks for making them pay more for a doll that resembles them. The Miami New Times quoted a black Target shopper as saying, "I feel sick right now."

When a Target employee explained to the customer that "most people are happy to hear that their doll isn't being discontinued," she became even more disconsolate. "When is this sort of thing going to stop, man?"