As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here’s Walter Williams on education fraud, from Front Page:

Philadelphia’s public school system has joined several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized academic achievement tests.

So far, the city has fired three school principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, “Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation’s largest cheating scandals.”

Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the students’ incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers.

In some cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test. …

While there’s widespread teacher test cheating to conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46 percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level.

Basic indicates only partial mastery. It’s a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the state of Pennsylvania’s 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s four-year high-school graduation rate in 2012 was 64 percent, well below the national rate of 78 percent. Even if a student graduates from high school, what does it mean?

What a high-school diploma means for white students is nothing to write home about, as suggested by the fact that every year, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students must take remedial courses in English or mathematics.

What a high-school diploma means for black students is nothing less than a disaster … When a student is given a high-school diploma, that attests that he can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level, and when he can’t do so at the eighth-grade level, that diploma is fraudulent. What makes it so tragic is that neither the student nor his parents are aware that he has a fraudulent diploma. When a black person is not admitted to college, flunks out of college, can’t pass a civil service test or doesn’t get job promotions, he is likelier to blame racial discrimination than his poor education.

Politicians, civil rights organizations and the education establishment will do nothing about the fraud. In fact, they give their full allegiance to the perpetrators.

We quote from Fred Reed’s blog Fred On Everything. The parts we’ve chosen give the substance and flavor of the article, in which we find much bitter truth.

Ah, the guttering candle of civilization! How I love it. The dwindling flames warm the cockles of a curmudgeon’s heart (whatever precisely a cockle may be): the galloping rot, the stampede to enstupidation, the gathering night of the Fifth Century.

We approve of him choosing the Fifth Century – when Christianity took over Europe from the Roman Empire – as the time when the darkness descended.

For a while I lost confidence in democracy, which was producing a depressingly literate and responsible public. A curmudgeon does not like to see prosperity and content growing from intelligent policy. It offends his sense of rightness. Now, thank Hera, the country rushes toward its appointed endpoint in the abyss. …

Why Hera, queen of the gods? Probably because of her special portfolio of Women & Marriage. Women come into the discussion later.

This, from UCLA, a daycare center in California which was formerly a university:

Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents — most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students’ assignments. The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color, which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class.

Wonderful! This is heady stuff. [According to this group] graduate students “of color” … can’t be expected to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” Fourth-grade English is just too hard for them, and they must be sheltered from the burden. Apparently they attend university to avoid being expected to learn anything.

This is balm to a curmudgeon’s cockles. You see, we of our ashen-souled and lonely trade, laboring in the shadows …  feast … on thorough-going damned foolishness, on lunacy, on luminous hypocrisy and suicidal moral preening. These are good times for us. We gorge.

Back to UCLA. Protecting minorities … from the travails of learning would seem more racist than requiring it of them, but never mind. Keep’em dumb, keep’em mad. …  Onward into the gloaming. Let the show go on. …

Someone famously said that democracy lasts until the unworthy learn that they can vote themselves the treasury. Yes. More generally, until they learn that they can vote themselves everything. Here is the backbone of American domestic policy, if that is the right word for floundering narcissism. The inadequate and barely lettered, by weight of numbers, can simply declare themselves the equals of their betters (or should I say “there betters”?). They don’t have to accomplish anything. They simply assert that they have done it, or that doing it is elitist and therefore reprehensible. I have in mind things like reading, scoring at the level of sentience on the SAT, or lifting mortar rounds.

The reduction of American universities to the academic level of the comic book … was of course preceded and made necessary by the mob’s desire for the trappings of education. The substance they find merely annoying. They have the votes, though, and pay the tuition. Thus they get what they want, a diploma, without having to subject their tiny minds to the oppressions of thought.

Their minds might not be tiny. Or they could be expanded. They need a decent education. But Fred doubts that all of them are educable. He despairs of many of them.

This unionism of the shiftless shapes society at all levels. Thus No Child Left Behind when clearly many children can’t possibly get ahead. Thus the drive to have all students in high school “college-ready” when a screaming maximum of twenty percent are smart enough for what used to be college work. Thus the feral grunting of rap.

But here is another jewel of degradation gleaming in the wan light of witlessness: A school (should I say “school”?) in Brooklyn, two-thirds of whose students are black or Hispanic, has abolished its … advanced courses for the intelligent. …

This is a faster road to universal inadequacy than imposing quotas.

Gutting courses for the intelligent also means that bright students of culler don’t got access to the advanced schooling that would let them rise in the world, know what I’m sayin’? …

We see the same principle of inadequacy voting itself the cookie jar in … everything. The Marines have opened the infantry to women. This is ridiculous, which is why I like the idea. Curmudgeons love the ridiculous, and find the results to vary between amusing and hilarious.

It is obvious that women are not physically up to ground combat, that they get pregnant more often than men, that training has to be enfeebled to maintain the pretense. But there are lots of them, and they vote. …

As a curmudgeon, I applaud the step toward equality. As a former Marine, I am fascinated that General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, signed off on it. He knows better. … But it’s democracy, see, and there are more women than Marines. …  Let the ever-lovin’ show go on. 

(Hat tip Frank.)

You may find it hard to believe this, but Secretary of State John Kerry’s  “peace talks” for Syria have failed.  

This is from the (Kerry-sympathetic) New York Times:

The first round of the Syria peace talks ended on Friday without achieving even its most modest goal: easing the Syrian government’s blockade on the delivery of food and medicine to besieged communities.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia raised expectations in January at a joint news conference in Paris that a way would be found to open humanitarian aid corridors and possibly establish local cease-fires in Aleppo and other cities and towns.

But to the dismay of the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, even those basic steps proved elusive.

What a surprise!

Now what? Can anything at all be done for non-combatant victims of the Syrian civil war?

There is this:

Physicians for Human Rights urges Israel to allow wounded Syrian refugees to stay for continued care.

Wounded Syrians are treated at this Israeli field hospital on the Golan Heights. Photo: REUTERS

Humanitarian help pleaded for from the “Nazi-like”, “apartheid state” of Israel?

This is from the Jerusalem Post:

With the collapse of peace talks on Friday between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the opposition, the prospect of more wounded Syrians seeking treatment and refuge in Israel will continue to rise.

UN special representative Lakhdar Brahimi delivered a harsh verdict for Syrian civilians confronted with spectacular levels of violence: “We’ve had just eight days of negotiations in Geneva…. I’m sorry to report there was no progress.”

The Jerusalem Post obtained Israel Health Ministry correspondence showing the tensions and dilemmas among medical professionals and advocates for the refugees.

In one letter from the ministry, the agency defended its care of Syrians, but added that “the medical establishment does not have the tools to ensure continuity of care after discharge, nor to protect patient from risk to his life.”

The NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)-Israel has urged Israeli governmental agencies to ensure “availability of continuity of care” following the discharge of hospitalized Syrians.

Israeli medical centers, including a military field hospital in the North, have provided healthcare services to roughly 700 refugees since 2013. The Post reported last week the first known case of a Syrian – a 17-year-old female – requesting asylum. The High Court of Justice rejected her petition and sent her back to Syria in late January. All of this helps to explain the growing involvement of Israel’s legal and medical personnel on the edges of the Syrian civil war.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 136,227 people have been killed since protests broke out against Assad in 2011. More than 2.4 million Syrians are defined as refugees.

Yossi Melman, a leading national security analyst who has written extensively about Syria, told the Post, “Zionism would not collapse if we accept 200 refugees. Why not?’”

Only 200? And then stop? The population of Syria is about 22 million.

Hadas Ziv, public outreach director for PHR-Israel, told the Post last week that Israel should press the UN to set up a safe haven in Syria, near the Israeli border, to create a humanitarian escape corridor.

Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, told the Post that the Syrian refugee crisis is “another example of the bankruptcy of the international humanitarian system.” There is “no UN mechanism” to address the problem, he stressed. The UN is “entirely politicized and has nothing to offer.”

Steinberg, who has an expertise in the inner workings of NGOs in the Middle East, said the Syrian refugee situation “leaves Israel completely on its own without the capacity to deal with the issues in a coherent manner. Israel would not get international assistance [even] if it would increase aid.”

Israel is in a “very complex position,” because it is technically in a state of war with Syria and the potent presence of al-Qaida there has added another threat, he said.

Well, maybe John Kerry will come up with a solution.

Take them off the shelf and dispose of them. No one’s buying them any more. They were just a seasonal novelty. Never caught on with the general public. Now they’re well past their sell-by date.

Feminists.

They’re useless things anyway. Evolutionary dead-ends.

This is from an article by John Hawkins at Townhall, Five Wacky Things Liberal Feminists Believe:

No one hates a happy, successful, much admired conservative woman more than left-wing feminists. In fact, the only thing that makes them angrier is the suggestion that the state shouldn’t provide them with free birth control. Actually on second thought, a lot of liberal feminists seem to hate men even more than not getting free birth control, which is kind of funny if you think about it. After all, if you hate men so much, you don’t need birth control. Speaking of that paradox…

1) All sex between men and women is rape …

What follows is too ugly and dumb to reproduce. Enough that it ends with: ” … women are dehumanised by this act (of sexual copulation). It is an act of violence.”

“Dehumanized” by the act that uniquely fulfills the female human body’s clear biological purpose!

2) Stay at home moms are failures:

From liberal feminist Amy Glass…

I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry

…Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. It’s hard for me to believe it’s not just verbally placating these people so they don’t get in trouble with the mommy bloggers.

Having kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone can do them. They are the most common thing, ever, in the history of the world. They are, by definition, average. And here’s the thing, why on earth are we settling for average?

…You will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you have a husband and kids.

We can all think instantly of great women who have been wives and mothers. The first two whose names  leap to this post are Margaret Thatcher and Marie Curie. Ayn Rand is a third – married but not a mother. Will Ms. Amy Glass match their achievements with her time energy, freedom and mobility? Lucky for her she had an average mom.

3) Women who have children are reprehensible. 

If you believe all sex is rape and mothering your children is for losers, it makes a certain kind of sense that many liberal feminists detest the idea of having kids. Of course, it also seems more than a little hypocritical to disown your own daughter for having a child (Just like mom!), but liberal feminist Alice Walker did it.

Alice severed ties with her daughter Rebecca in 2004 after learning that her 30-something daughter had committed the most heinous of anti-feminist acts: procreation. On purpose!

Daughter Rebecca recalls:

I was at one of her homes, sitting, and told her my news and that I’d never been happier. She went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then, she asked if I could check on her garden.

After exchanging a series of emails, Alice wrote to Rebecca to say that their relationship had been “inconsequential for years” and that she was no longer interested in being a mother to her daughter. She later cut Rebecca out of her will.

As Rebecca has since revealed, Alice’s lip service to choice, opportunity, and freedom for women doesn’t allow room for her own daughter to choose motherhood.

That shows how nasty a creed feminism is.

Back to the gobsmacking stupidity of these mules:

4) … One of the more bizarre beliefs that feminists embrace is that gender is just a social construct. …

No matter how much liberal feminists desire it to be so, there are real and very important differences between men and women. One of those differences is that women are the ones with vaginas. Of course, don’t tell that to liberal feminist Jessica Valenti:

I have to disagree with something you said. Not only women have vaginas. Saying that only women have vaginas alienates the trans community, because some women have penises, and some men have vaginas, not to mention all the nonbinary people in the world. Anatomy and biology do not determine one’s gender identity any more than they do one’s sexual orientation.

And their inane puerility:

5) All men are evil and deserve to be punished.

There’s a reason feminists are stereotyped as bitter, man-hating, trench harpies. It’s because most of them are bitter, man-hating, trench harpies. In fact, if you took the man hatred out of the movement, left-wing feminism would collapse because it’s more philosophically centered around hating men than helping women. Just to give you a few examples…

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.” – Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine Editor

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” -– Valerie Solanas

“The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.” — Sally Miller Gearhart

“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.” – Catherine Comins

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are” — Marilyn French

In dramatic contrast, here is a great woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, talking sense about women who really need to be set free – and are ignored by the petty, ignorant, cowardly Western feminist movement: