In good schools, high demands are placed on teachers and students. A teacher who is not considered effective by the principal is given unsatisfactory ratings and threatened with disciplinary charges. Most teachers with unsatisfactory observation reports transfer to less demanding schools. In egregious cases, a teacher will be terminated. Students are also not allowed to misbehave and cut classes in good schools. Such students are suspended and transferred to alternative learning centers or bad schools that tolerate misbehavior.

In the bad school I taught at, students were allowed to cut class as much as they liked. First period classes were mostly empty because students would come to school late. In high school, it is important for students to go to every class because the day’s lesson depend on knowing what was taught in the previous lesson. In 1995, I testified to the New York State Education Department about the poor discipline in my school. You can read my testimony at
http://www.dkroemer.com/page68/page68.html

There is a further problem: Jews and blacks, though at extreme opposites of the IQ scale, are political allies. Why? There is the victimhood theme in both black and Jewish narratives. But, Jews also want to use blacks as a political weapon to morally de-legitimize whites(who happen to be the most powerful rival to the Jews).

So, the issue of black and Hispanic underperformance is only one side of the larger problem. The other problem is Jewish overperformance. Since Jews outperform us and have more money and influence, they get to decide educational policy. Jews have chosen egalitarianism because affirmative action is much more likely to hurt white gentiles than Jews. Firemen like Frank Ricci are affected more than multi-millionaire Jewish lawyers or financiers.

CUNY was great in the 50’s because smart Jewish kids couldn’t get into Harvard, Yale or Stanford because of money or quotas limiting the number of Jews admitted. Now they can.

Test scores topped off in the 60’s because the teachers were women who couldn’t go into law, medicine, or investment banking. Now they can.

Sorry, Pat, you can’t go back to the 50’s.

This is a brief commentary about the latest Buchanan article. Read his article attached inline below first.

As someone who worked at CUNY – Hostos and found out the hard way, about the consequences of getting on the wrong side of entrenched factions, corrupt managers, student thugs and crooked union officials, I welcome this article even though I probably don’t agree with some of its author’s “possible” motives.

AS a CUNY alumnus (CCNY class of 94) I am increasingly angered to see that the people in charge of CUNY have created and expanded upon a disaster of this magnitude. Under their tutelage CUNY has become an academic and political cesspool that now stands dangerously close to being labeled a diploma mill – a death sentence for any university.

Worst of all, open admissions, normally the easy target for every low brow racist and bigot, is now being brought up by a man who should know better, as the culprit for every evil that afflicts CUNY. I think Pat Buchanan, a fellow Catholic and a man with whom I agree with on a lot of key issues except immigration, owes it to himself to take a deeper look at this mess, and consider that open admissions was intended to be a right to a try out, not a right to continued enrollment and certainly not a right to a diploma.

Had open admissions been handled properly, the unprepared would have been filtered out and sent back to adult HS or the factory floor, usually in the first or second semester, while those who met the high standard would have been rewarded with an additional tuition free semester at a premium quality CUNY institution, and would have had a continued chance to eventually join an august body of CUNY alumni in the highest strata of American professional life.

It was the arrogance of big time government spenders and the demands of CUNY bottom liners, short termers and community factionalists, that turned open admissions into the disaster CUNY has today.

Of course, an even deeper look would reveal a class of freshmen who stand a good chance of being the product of an NYC K-12 school system that abandoned children a long long time ago. But that’s another story. And as with present day CUNY it’s a study of the interaction between incompetence and criminality.

Javier

Mike D’Antonio

I’ve thoroughly enojoyed all you’ve offered on your site (most of which I read from Human Events) over the years. I am a first-time poster.

Being a conservative and a public school teacher can on occasion present its challenges, but usually staying professional keeps things on good terms. Folks just want the job done.

I do, however, have to take exception with your characterization of students in regard to musical ability and band. Yes, I am the director of bands at my high school. I know it’s a small element of your article, but one I cannot avoid addressing. You state “…there are many kids who do not have… the musical ability to play in a high school band” as if this is an assumed truth. It is not.

Now, in nearly 20 years of teaching, I’ve heard all the jokes and stereotypes about the proverbial band geek and squawking marching band. Largely, those stereotypes exist because there’s a strain of truth in them. My own colleagues have often perpetuated them. It wouldn’t be a funny joke if those strains of truth didn’t exist.

That being said, I’m going to stake my entire professional reputation on one point: Every child can be successful in band.

Now, we do need to recognize that some non-mainstream students may have disabilities that even prevent participation, or prevent results that you or I would care to listen to. Nonetheless, within the mainstream student, my program can, and does, make every single student a successful performer that you would be interested in hearing play, regardless of aptitude.

Sure, certain innate qualities in some students lend themselves to being musically excellent much faster and on higher levels than others. Mostly, though, music is a skill, and proper exercise and development in those skills will create, at minimum, passable musicianship in every child. Every single one.

Wheras a person such as myself may not be able to play football due to the genetic lottery of a small and lanky frame, music is a human quality that is with us since birth. It’s a language everyone understands even before mastery of the spoken word.

Unlike the other elements you listed in the paragraph above, every single child can reach an acceptable level of mastery on a band instrument.

If every student isn’t succeeding in your band program, then you need to examine the teacher, or look at the resources being provided to that department. While I know that may read like me saying “more money,” what I have experienced is that many school systems relegate their band programs to 2nd or 3rd class status and then wonder why that one director with ancient equipment can’t make all the kids, 6-12, sound good.

Sorry to blather, but my point is thus: Every single child can be successful in band. And I mean successful enough for any layman to appreciate.

Of course, we would never even consider booting substandard students. Universities that used to pride themselves on weeding out students who were “not college material” now boast of their ability to get those same students a degree. Indeed, many college ranking systems, including the one used by U.S. News & World Report, include “Retention Rate” as a positive for colleges and universities. So now, keeping substandard students not only brings financial benefits to institutions of higher learning, it also improves their reputations.

What a topsy turvy world we have created for ourselves.

What a great title for this article; “Dumbo University.” I laughed out loud when I saw it.

As for the idea that kids should be disciplined in school, I am all for that, although I think it is really the job of the parents in a uniculture–not a “multicultural” cesspit.

My parents were teachers and so is my unmarried senior citizen “wife.”

Given that, NOT all families are equal either. I am thinking in particular of the Muslim family, which punishes the child for attempting to fit-in to the host culture. The form of familial discipline exerted is murder, plain and simple.

My wife has related to me how the baboons she attempts to teach make her life hell-on-earth, as a substitute art teacher. They are rude and disrespectful, and simply have no class, unless it be an underclass.

No wonder Anglo-Saxons gravitate to white enclaves! Who wants to live with a bunch of miscreants who throw boulders at one another in the parking lot?

“Birds of a feather flock together.” It may be a trite saying, but it is the truth.

My stepmother was a high school principal, and had to call the cops every day, to manage the rock apes at her inner city school.

When I was a young student, I noticed that while I was attempting to maintain my grade point average, in order to qualify for college, the Mexicans were going around in gangs, intent on shaking down their “fellow students” for their coats and lunch money. They were natural-born banditos and bullies. Recently, I was informed by a new acquaintance– through a mutual friend–that the leader of that gang which terrorized all the white kids, ended up as a long-term “corrections client” in state prison.

The Marxist bastions passing for centers of higher learning, in this day-and-age, more resemble prison yard theaters, than institutions of higher learning and crucibles of liberty.

Another glaring example of what happens when the white man is absent as a stabilizing force, is the spectacle of violent partition India and Pakistan provided the world, after British colonial rule ended.

While American blacks were complaining about racist oppression–which they may have had a point in stating–their brothers back in Africa were carving one another ups with machetes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Congo. Idi Amin Dada–The Butcher of Uganda,” was no Abe Lincoln either.

Things got rather hot, under Ol’ Pol Pot, after the French ended their colonial rule of Indo-China.

I might like to mention the 38 million-man Mexican occupation army, which voted with their feet to trudge North, for the superior administration of the white man. They couln’t fathom revolution or change in their own country, but opted to descend on America instead, as thieving scarecrows.

Gee, I hope that wasn’t too “politically incorrect.” God forbid someone should speak the truth.

The article also presented some interesting and historical information regarding Spiro Agnew.