Story from East Bay Express. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
Berkeley is probably the most liberal place in the United States, (located near San Francisco, CA). They best reflect the thinking of radical secular leftists who value equality of outcome far more than liberty and excellence. Rather than introducing educational reforms like merit-based pay, standardized testing, and expedited firing of underperforming teachers, they instead punish success with wealth redistribution.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Let’s think about this. in the west, according to info please ( http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884133.html ), blacks make up about 5% of the population. While in the general population, they make up about 12.3%. But in this one science teacher’s science classes, they make up 17.5%. In Latinos make up abvout 12.5% of the general population, yet they make up 13.9% of the science classes.
Yet, somehow it makes sense to punish all people in science classes because certain groups are not performing as well as the majority of the population? This is social engineering lunacy at its worst.
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I read all these posts, about this “equality” garbage, the state of Detroit, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I’m not a politician, I’m not an economist, I’m a layman on all these issues, and yet the evidence of this thought process is glaringly obvious to me.
Why does this happen? Is this spiritual blindness? I just don’t understand how these people in power can not see that they’re flushing the country down the toilet.
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My thinking on this is that their first priority is to be perceived as being morally superior, probably due to guilt from their childhoods or private lives, e.g. – Kwame Kilpatrick and his mistress, or Obama and his cocaine. And what the public thinks of as “morally good” is wealth distribution, so that’s what the politicians give them. If I were in charge, I would be educating the public on economics, and replacing every PC intrusion into the schools with business and economics courses – and it would all be structured as debates between two sides, so everyone could decide for themselves and think critically.
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Liberalism = Racism with a smile
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They’re the only ones who ever talk about race. I never talk about it and I’m about as far from white as you can get.
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I followed few links deep from this article and found that democrat was the party that supported slavery in the past? Hmmm interesting…
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Lincoln was a Republican.
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just when I thought California couldn’t get any worse. They seem hell bent on ruining our country with these horrible ideas.
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“just when I thought California couldn’t get any worse. They seem hell bent on ruining our country with these horrible ideas.”
California’s already ruled that school children are not to be taught that there are “boys” and “girls” — too controversial, and, no, I’m not making this up.
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I find this quite disturbing. The only analogy I can think of is of a madrassa — we will teach the students the Koran and the Hadiths because that is all they need to know.
This bunch seem to think that if they teach equality that is all they need to know.
Trouble is that science is not something you can discover. It is frequently counter-intuitive. It requires skepticism, experiments, and continuing revision of our understanding as more experiments are done.
It ain’t pretty, but it is a method of refining knowledge.
(I have friends who have their kids in Christian schools. They don’t necessarily like some of the data from biology (read evolution) but they teach it and they discuss it).
Berkeley is making a choice for their students. They will not be able to survive any competitive science or engineering programme. They will not be able to argue back.
But Berkeley is comfortable with their theology and their new Madrassa. At least the Muslims have had some reforming movements and some sophistication in their reasoning.
For I see none here.
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