Monday, September 08, 2003
Berkeleyans are idiots, case-study
From the Daily Cal:
The Berkeley Board of Education unanimously approved the official creation of a new small school within Berkeley High School Wednesday.
About 400 of the roughly 2,900 Berkeley High students make up the new Communication Arts and Sciences school. Officials hope this will be the first of many new autonomous small schools.
First of all, let's talk about nomenclature. Communication Arts and Sciences. It means absolutely nothing. "The program involves a social justice curriculum with a multimedia theme, according to media teacher Dharini Rasiah." That is Communication Arts and Sciences? Social justice is not a curriculum, it's a world view. This is equivalent to a catholic school in the sense that it's guided by a particular worldview which is not to be questioned but only reinforced. But it's publicly funded, which means somebody should really be pissed.
However, some concerns have been raised over how the Communication Arts and Sciences program would handle Advanced Placement classes. The small school does not teach any AP classes.
The Communication Arts and Sciences program was started to help close the achievement gap, which is due partly to the AP program, (CAS Director) Ayers said. He criticized the AP program for sorting students into groups of winners and losers.
You get the feeling that Ayers never went to high school. Students can be and should be sorted into groups of winners and losers. Those groupings aren't artificial. Ayers suggests, for the sake of the self-esteem or some such of the losers, that we should not give winners the opportunity to succeed, but instead group them with the losers so that they can't go anywhere.
There are two schools of thought on high school, and they are tuned to two different types of students. The first school is that high school is a place of education, where students go to learn about some topics to prepare them for the future. There are students who approach school this way, and can be found taking challenging classes (i.e. AP). Most of us Berkeley students were in this group.
The other school is that high school is a storage location for keeping teenagers so they don't go burning down the city or something. These students take the easiest courses they can find, and don't really care about learning.
Each type of student needs to be in a different class. When you stick them together, the non-student students keep the actual students from making any progress at all, and basically ruin the educational experience for those students who really do want a future. The true genius of the AP program was not the tests, but the ability to make this segregation of students based on their perception of their role in high school.
Ayers doesn't like this segregation. He seems to feel that, for equality reasons, all students should have to fail.
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