Search Results for: the war on standards
September 2, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Mark Graber is a distinguished law professor at the University of Maryland. Until very recently, he coached the school’s mock trial team, leading it to the national championship in (or around) 2008. Until very recently, his daughter Abigail Graber assisted him. She’s an attorney in Washington, D.C. who clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and served on the Yale Law Journal. On
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August 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
We have written about the war on standards. Most of the time, this war takes the form of attempts to bulldoze standards of conduct and achievement that stand in the way of equal distribution of society’s benefits and prizes to Blacks. Usually the standards are specific, as are the potential consequences of falling short. A certain test score must be attained to qualify for a job. A criminal law, if
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March 23, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the Montgomery County school district (which covers an affluent suburban county just outside of Washington, D.C.) is concerned about racial disparities in its “gifted student” programs. A report it commissioned found marked disparities by race and ethnicity in enrollment and acceptance rates, with white and Asian students faring much better than their black and Hispanic counterparts. The report notes, for example, that enrollment in the
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March 21, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I hope you read Katherine Kersten’s article, presented yesterday by Scott, about the impact of “equity” in disciplinary action on schools in the Twin Cities. As Kersten explains, “equity” in this context isn’t about fairness — that is, the same rules for everyone. Rather, it means that “if one group’s outcomes on social measures are not identical to all of the others’, the cause is presumed to be discrimination and
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March 19, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The Justice Department has instructed local courts throughout America about how to treat people who violate local ordinances. DOJ has already sued Ferguson, Missouri for allegedly violating citizens rights by virtue of its treatment of people who run afoul of local rules and refuse to pay the resulting fines. Now, Vanita Gupta, head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has sent a warning letter that, in her words, “articulate[s] a set
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May 5, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Bob McManus of the New York Post wonders whether Demetrius Blackwell, who shot NYPD officer Brian Moore dead, would have been on the street with his gun had the old stop-and-frisk policies, which Mayor de Blasio eliminated, been in effect. Chances are that Blackwell, a reckless hard core thug, would have been, but we will never know for sure. More broadly, McManus wonders about the consequences of what he calls
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April 18, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Paul has been writing about the war on standards in various aspects of our society, generally as a means of advancing the interests of minorities (or purporting to advance them, anyway). Now it appears that the decline of standards–indeed, the abolition of any standards at all–has come to the world of college debate. The Atlantic reports: These days, an increasingly diverse group of participants has transformed debate competitions, mounting challenges
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April 10, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
I have written often about the left’s war on standards, an attempt to bulldoze standards of conduct and achievement that stand in the way of equal distribution of society’s benefits and prizes to Blacks. One major front in that war is the federal government’s attack, via EEOC lawsuits, on employers that use the background checks to screen applicants for employment. The government takes particular exception to the use of criminal
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March 9, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
The College Board is once again altering the SAT. According to the Washington Post, the SAT’s writers appear to be doing two things: changing what they test and making the test easier. To me, it sounds as if the SAT will be made easier largely by changing what it tests. For example, the Post says that students will no longer be expected to know “difficult, lesser-used vocabulary words” and “advanced
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October 25, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Obama administration is pressing ahead with its plan to impose racial quotas on the financial industry via the Dood-Frank law. Dodd-Frank requires agencies with financial sector regulatory responsibilities to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” that will develop diversity and inclusion standards for workplaces and contracting. Accordingly, these agencies have published in the Federal Register a proposed “Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies
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September 16, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
We often hear from the left that our criminal justice system is broken. Part of what the left, including our Attorney General, means by this is that too many people are in jail, especially too many Blacks. I take no position in this post about that claim. But in the case of Aaron Alexis — the Navy Yard mass murderer — it looks like the criminal justice system’s breakdown consists
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September 12, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I have written from time to time about the “war on standards” being waged by the modern civil rights movement — an attempt to bulldoze standards of conduct and achievement that stand in the way of equal distribution of society’s benefits and prizes to Blacks. Examples of such standards include, but are not limited to, (1) certain employment criteria — e.g., tests and criminal background checks — (2) some criminal
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December 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
A reader from Northern Virginia follows up on my post about the elimination of grades below “C” in many California school districts by informing me about a lowering of educational standards in his state. He reports: Here in Virginia students can still fail the statewide Standards of Learning (SOL) reading test, but the method used to determine failure was changed so that fewer children would be seen as failing. In
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December 6, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Some of California’s largest school districts are dropping D and F grades. Students who don’t learn the material, pass the final exam, or finish homework by the end of the semester would earn an “incomplete” which, I assume, could be converted to at least a “C” later on. Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, San Diego Unified are among the districts that will make this move. According this
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August 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Considering how much I hate receiving parking tickets, this is one war on standards I might get behind. However, it also extends to compliance with driving, vehicle registration, and fine-paying requirements. The Washington Post assigned a team to investigate ticketing in Washington, D.C. The team collected five years of traffic and parking enforcement data containing more than 10 million records of infractions. It then merged that information with data from
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June 22, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Black law school graduates fail the bar exam in disproportionate numbers. That’s not surprising when one remembers that, thanks to racial preferences, Blacks are admitted to law schools with worse credentials — college grades and LSAT scores — than are Whites and Asian-Americans. Bar passage rates are unequal, but there’s nothing inequitable about them. Blacks and Whites take the same exam and the grading is color blind. What’s inequitable is
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January 9, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has taken note of the Obama administration’s promulgation of national guidance on how schools should discipline students. The guidance is couched as an attempt (1) to introduce rationality and uniformity into school disciplinary practices which, allegedly, are unfairly causing students to miss too much class time and (2) to address racial disparities in the meting out of discipline. The first goal is phony. The federal government doesn’t know as
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