June 15, 2010

Dept. of Better Late than Never

Veteran progressive John Judis experiences an epiphany in The New Republic (10/20/2009) in "End State: Is California Finished?"
But the heart of the problem lies in California's K-12 education: According to the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, California eighth-graders came in forty-eighth in 2007 among the 50 states and District of Columbia in reading and forty-fifth in math.

At the conference at Stanford, members of Hoover's Task Force on K-12 Education tried to explain why schools in California and elsewhere were performing poorly. The experts generally blamed bad teaching and the refusal of the teachers' unions to do anything about it. They want to improve the teaching through evaluations that weed out bad teachers, through merit pay to reward good ones, and by paying extra to teachers willing to teach in problematic schools. They also want to use school choice and, in some cases, vouchers, and the establishment of charter schools to pressure poorly performing schools. (With support from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has advanced a set of proposals along these lines.) For many reformers, everything begins and ends with bad teachers and union obstinacy.

At the gathering, held in a plush conference room, one of the experts projected tables and graphs comparing various states. It was there that I had my own "AHA!" moment. The states with thriving educational systems were generally northern, predominately white, and with relatively few immigrants: the New England states, North Dakota, and Minnesota. That bore out the late Senator Patrick Moynihan's quip that the strongest factor in predicting SAT scores was proximity to the Canadian border. 

The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism and with a relative absence of new-economy jobs; states like West Virginia that have relatively few jobs for college grads; and states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii that have huge numbers of non-English-speaking, downscale immigrants whose children are entering the schools. 

Actually, New Mexico and Hawaii don't have that many immigrants. New Mexico started out Hispanic, so it doesn't have a good enough economy to attract Mexican immigrants. Hawaii just seems like Lotus Land. All the ambitious Hawaiians, like Barack Obama and Bette Midler, leave.
California clearly falls into the last group, suggesting that California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to the growth of the state's immigrant population after the 1965 federal legislation on immigration opened the gates.

In California, one in four students has to learn English in school, while the average in the United States is less than one in ten. Half of California students are eligible for free or reduced meals. Together, almost 60 percent of California's school population is made up of Hispanics, many of them low-income, and African Americans--groups that generally have a much lower rate of student achievement than whites, Asians, and upper-income students. (One in three Latinos fails to graduate from high school.) And that affects how well schools do in the Department of Education's measure of "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP). As the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) reports: "Fifty percent of elementary schools with the highest share of low-income students made AYP in 2007, whereas 98 percent of elementary schools with the lowest share of low-income students made AYP. This suggests that AYP reveals more about the type of students who attend a school than it does about the effectiveness of teachers and administrators at that school.”

This is not to say that exceptional teachers can't make a difference. It is also not to say that non-English-speaking immigrant kids are unteachable. But they are more difficult to teach, especially when their parents aren't high school graduates. And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources, as well as active and knowledgeable support from parents, their achievement levels are likely to bring down a state's bar graph.

95 comments:

asdfasdfasdf said...

"The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism and with a relative absence of new-economy jobs"

Really? Then how come black students suck in the North too? Just how good are Detroit or Chicago schools with lots of blacks? How are Somalis doing in Minneapolis?
Racism Schamism.

And if Southern bigotry was the reason for poor black performance, how come Jews in the south did so much better than Christian Southerners?
And wasn't the Southwest pretty nasty to Chinese and Japanese? Whites made Chinese do a lot of hard work on railroads. Japanese Americans were treated as second class citizens and sent to prison camps during WWII. Yet, looks to me like Chinese and Japanese Americans are doing better than whites these days.

If Judis is gonna blame white 'racism' for black failure, maybe we should blame Jewish elitism, supremacism, and concentration of wealth for all our woes.

Anonymous said...

Well, if human biodiversity becomes the new explanation for failing schools, we know that the teachers' unions really are that powerful.

Anonymous said...

Today must be opposite day. Up next: Steve becomes a blank slate fanatic. I predict this fella just Watsoned his own career.

Anonymous said...

So California is turning into a place with high-tech Indian reservation for low-IQ groups. If only someone had written a book about this 16 years ago.

Anonymous said...

Please complete this sentence:
"California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to ..."

"the influx of Mexican students with low intelligence."

Even in a moment of epiphany, Judis tethers his deep insight to PC nonsense.

Clearly, if mastering our public school curriculum is required for every citizen to meaningfully and productively participate in our economy and democracy, then the admission of 45 million Hispanics to our nation since 1965 was a grave error, correctable perhaps only by disenfranchisement and deportation. Most likely, though, the error will not be corrected. White Americans will adapt to life as a minority in a dumb, poor, violent, corrupt, crowded, polluted, low social capital country ruled by a dictator.

At the 2007 Achievement Gap Summit in Sacramento, educrats estimated that nearly a trillion dollars would be required to bring California Hispanic levels of academic achievement up to those of whites and Asians.

Our last hope is that the US Geologic Survey will find new unexploited mineral wealth in the Sierra's to fund No Latino Left Behind.

Anonymous said...

As you may or may not know, San Francisco employs a "diversity index" to alot school assignments.
This is based on the idea that if you have a socioeconomically diverse set of families at a school, the test schools of the whole will increase.

About 60% of the kids in the city are on "school lunch" and are "english language learners", which means they go to the head of the line and get first dibs at the best schools.

The city also has a number of language immersion schools where, of course, 50% of the kids must be native speakers of the "target language". Surprise! Only Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean and Tagalog are offered. No Russian, Japanese, French or German immersion. The long and the short of it is that in order to get enough Spanish "target" language speakers, they're practically recruiting Mexican kids (probably illegal) into these programs. Meanwhile, non-diverse middle class families, of any color, get school assignment to the absolute bottom of the barrel.

Of course, most families who are "not diverse" do not get a good school assignment. I'm talking serious bottom of the barrel (CST scores sub 30%). They end up sending their kids to private school. Many other families move out of SF.

A few professional families stay in the school system, if they've managed to get their kid into a not too bad school.

The net effect is to push the middle class out of the public school system in SF.

Now, surprise, the test scores for schools with a lot of Latino kids are abyssmal. In fact, the federal government has deemed 10 San Francisco schools to be at the bottom of the national list. I'd guess that half of these are more than 60% Latino.

This year, the city had run through it's Rainy Day Fund and also had the same state cuts that everybody else had.

Everything is all hush-hush about these ten schools.

The Teacher's Union was going to allow the teachers and principals at these ten schools to be axed. Yes, there is a lot of scurrying around by the Teacher's Union. It's very silent these days, as the public is starting to catch onto the Teacher'sUnion-AchievementGap-ReachForTheTop debacle. The craigslist ads for Spanish speaking teachers (amidst the layoffs of mostly white, unilingual teachers) indicate what the school board is up to.

But, just when you think there's going to be a mea culpa, up from the ashes springs a push for:

You guessed it! A push to overturn prop 13 and stick to those evil money grubbing corporations.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think we can educate all of Mexico's poorest (and there US born children) AND deal with all our other problems.

This push to overturn prop 13 will increase tax on corporations. (Notably, it will *not* address the tax disparity for homeowners.) The name of the movement is www.ClosetheLoophole.com. FYI, It's got major backing from the Teacher's Union as well as other unions.

So, Steve, you were wondering how the California-liberal-powers-that-be were going to deal with those ugly test school results, the answer is:

A create a diversion, blame the money grubbing corporations, www.ClosetheLoophole.com campaign.

-pd in sf

Anonymous said...

"The heart of California's problem lies in education"....

The problem lies in the very poor quality of immigrants and illegals that have entered the state in the last 45 years.

OneSTDV said...

I wonder how long until he has to resign for this article.

Anonymous said...

I often wonder: can the John Judises of DC really not apply Occam's Razor to the famous Race Gap, or would it just be so psychologically painful to acknowledge the obvious reality that their minds can't/won't even entertain the possibility?

Our intellectual establishment is truly near the breaking point.

The Bear said...

"The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism"

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Underachiever said...

To summarize: if a state fills with Mexicans, it becomes like Mexico.

Anonymous said...

"And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources..."

Well he finally got around to it.

Anonymous said...

"And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources, as well as active and knowledgeable support from parents, their achievement levels are likely to bring down a state's bar graph."

Think he'll acknowledge the HBD community for being ahead of him on this?

Anonymous said...

Well that looked pretty good, like maybe somebody was actually getting it, until the last sentence- "an influx of resources." All he's saying is what these people always say, "More money!"

Anonymous said...

What's this obsession with teachers, anyway? I don't think they're just being scapegoated; many actually seem to believe they can make pupils "enthusiastic" and so on. I think the most important factor - apart from the schoolchildren - is the tools for studying, primarily the books. Teachers come in second, a distant second, I'd say.

Anonymous said...

Yep, more money.

The stuff Steve quoted is just to set up Judis' plaint that all of California's problems result from those eeevil Republicans refusing to vote for tax increases.

Jerry said...

What an idiot this Judis is. He says a few obviously true things, and then he winds up with:

California... has been stymied--in booms as well as busts--by a political system that can't respond to California's new economy...
The biggest reason for this paralysis is the radicalization of California's Republican Party."

And there we have it.

This is all going to end badly.

Kylie said...

Steve Sailer said..."John Judis experiences an epiphany", referring to the latter's "AHA moment" when he realizes that "...California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to the growth of the state's immigrant population after the 1965 federal legislation on immigration opened the gates."

But further on, Judis manages to twist facts and logic to conclude that the poor quality of students in California is not the reason for the poor performance of California school. Oh, no. It's the economy, stupid!

"Surely there are problems within California's schools. But the underlying problem that must ultimately be addressed is the segmented structure of California's economy that creates its own tracking system along the lines of income, race, and nationality within the schools. More than anything, that is what has been holding back the realization of [former University of Californa president] Clark Kerr's dream for California [in which anyone who graduates from high school can attend college]."


Clearly Judis's article is not from the Dept. of Better Late than Never but from the Dept. of Too Little, Too Late.

Reg Cæsar said...

All the ambitious Hawaiians, like Barack Obama and Bette Midler, leave.

In a state that's two-thirds Asian, your expat notables are a black and a white? What about part- and whole-Asians and Hawaiians? Like Akebono, Ron Darling, Guy Kawasaki... (OK, short list.) And for white folks, Steve Case is at least as impressive as Bette Midler.

How are Somalis doing in Minneapolis? --Asdfasdfasdf [who's missing two-and-a-half rows on his keyboard]

Significantly better than American blacks, which is why the latter hate the former.

Please complete this sentence:
"California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to ..."

"the influx of Mexican students with low intelligence."
--anon

No need to choose. Peter Brimelow wrote one whole book about each problem. Plenty of blame to share...

jody said...

the problem is that, as steve has pointed out when he cited an IQ study, the border states are not just filling up with mexicans, but with the dumbest mexicans. IQ 87 mexicans, the bottom of the barrel in mexico.

no wonder president calderon is so gung-ho about keeping the border open. mexico gets to dump millions of their problem citizens on the US instead of having to deal with them.

IQ 87 losers leave mexico, billions of dollars in money transfers come back into mexico. it's a win-win for an economy which is otherwise almost completely dependent on PEMEX and it's declining oil production.

wait until the cantarell field is depleted enough that mexico can no longer export oil. then the REAL immivasion begins. think there are a lot of border jumpers now? we ain't seen nothing yet.

Piper said...

All the stuff in the latter part of that article about how California just needs a stiff does of higher taxes, an easy cure which is wickedly stymied by insanely evil Republicans and their tyrannical Prop. 13, shows either partisan desperation or real doublethink. Of course, Judis swiped that part of his piece from Paul Krugman.

Judis cites all sorts of numbers while he's talking about students and education or changes in California's economy and job mix. But when he gets to taxes and state spending suddenly it's all arm-waving, no numbers.

He could have cribbed numbers easily enough from Matt Welch. I wonder if Judis realized that Welch had refuted Judis' thesis before he published it? Such are the wages of Judis' left-wing me-tooism.

Why did TNR publish Judis at all? They could have gotten some filler from Krugman's syndicator; it might even have been cheaper.

Anonymous said...

too little, too late... California is lost, the country is lost... it was good while it lasted. At least we can analyze and complain at iSteve...

Anonymous said...

Well, I expect the lefties will start calling him 'John Judas' from now on.

eh said...

OT

An interestingly skeptical piece on interracial marriage on CNN (of all places):

U.S. far from an interracial melting pot

OhioStater said...

Are weaker students more expensive to educate than gifted students?

Anonymous said...

On a tangent:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/06/15/residents_get_6_votes_each_in_suburban_ny_election/

Federal judge tries to rig voting system to increase Hispanic representation.

Anonymous said...

Fred said: "I don't think there was ever much anti-Jewish bigotry in the South. They did have a Jewish secretary of war in the Confederacy, after all"

There were restricted hotels, real estate covenants, and the Klu Klux Klan to deal with but otherwise...

Peter A said...

wait until the cantarell field is depleted enough that mexico can no longer export oil. then the REAL immivasion begins

I doubt it. As people are pointing out, California is well on its way to being Mexico North. At some point we will reach an equilibrium point where emigrating to the US no longer makes sense for most Mexicans.

Anonymous said...

"Influx of bad teachers"? From where,Somalia? People like this spend their lives re-inventing the wheel. All of what he writes has been known for a very long time in one form or another. It seems like a veiled call for mo' money, mo'missionary efforts by whites, etc. If we were smart we'd cut our losses by decreasing the amounts spent trying to get what can't be gotten.

Anonymous said...

At what point do the teachers start to speak up about what is going on? They must be tired of being blamed for the lack of performance. Now that teachers in California are getting wacked you would think that they would be out front demanding less immigration. Their fear of saying the "I" word is stronger than anything else.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous: I think the most important factor - apart from the schoolchildren - is the tools for studying, primarily the books.

You're looking at this from the point of view of someone with an IQ of 130+: "Just give me the dadgum books, and I can teach myself."

Instead, you need to try to look at this from the point of view of someone with an IQ a good 50 or 75 points lower than that, which would amount to a bunch of monosyllables along the lines of, "Uhh, buh, guh, yeah, uhh..."


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jody: the problem is that, as steve has pointed out when he cited an IQ study, the border states are not just filling up with mexicans, but with the dumbest mexicans. IQ 87 mexicans, the bottom of the barrel in mexico.

87 is way high - it's entirely possible that the average Mexican Indian illegal alien has an IQ a good 10 points lower than that [with the left half of their bell curve solidly in the 70s, 60s, and 50s].

Anonymous said...

personally i can't wait until we're further enriched from all the diversity from Afghanistan (dancing boys anyone?) Somalia -(child rape, female circumcision) Uzbeck/allthe/stans... so many different resturuants! plus those smart immigrants not only do the lowest jobs americans don't want to do but also keep our nuclear facilities running and innovate in ways we dumb (gentile) yankees can't .

Of course israel doesn't need this sort of diversity because jews value education and thus, have better restaurant and engineers.

Big Bill said...

Speaking of Detroit, they have closed the education gap in some respects. As best I remember some recent results, white boys either flunk out more than blacks or have lower NAEP scores.

Anonymous said...

It would also be interesting to hear what Judis' collaborator, Ruy Texeira, who worked with him on 2002's "The Emerging Democratic Majority" has to say these days. Texeira is even more of a cheerleader for the Great Majority-Minority America To Come in 2042, but one wonders if even he is beginning to rethink whether the prize will anything worth having.

Anonymous said...

> And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources, as well as active and knowledgeable support from parents,<

Here's an idea:

1. "extraordinary infusion of resources": give every Educator an annual salary of $1 million; and

2. "active and knowledgeable support from parents:" have parents of high-achieving kids do all the class work of the "special needs" kids.

It MUST be done. Diversity is our top priority.

Anonymous said...

When the country is a bankrupt third world dictatorship with low scale civil wars breaking out and narco gangs controlling large parts of the country the good liberals may finally say: "something maybe be wrong". They MAY say that - if they are kind!

Kind of like after tens of millions Russians murdered, including whole classes of teachers, priests, engineers, etc. the communists said: "something may be wrong". They sort of said it - how kind of them, how progressive!

Anonymous said...

"So, Steve, you were wondering how the California-liberal-powers-that-be were going to deal with those ugly test school results, the answer is:

"A create a diversion, blame the money grubbing corporations, www.ClosetheLoophole.com "


However, it won't work. All the money in the world won't close the achievement gap. LA school district spends $27K per student per year. That is enough money to have teacher tutor each kid one on one for over 3.5 hours a day and pay her $50k a year.

Anonymous said...

"IQ 87 losers leave mexico, billions of dollars in money transfers come back into mexico. it's a win-win for an economy which is otherwise almost completely dependent on PEMEX and it's declining oil production.

"wait until the cantarell field is depleted enough that mexico can no longer export oil. then the REAL immivasion begins. think there are a lot of border jumpers now? we ain't seen nothing yet."


How about we export free birth control and send docs to sterilize poor Latinas? Some Madison Ave. firm could spin it so it would catch right on south of the border.

It would be cheaper than fighting or deporting or putting up with more illegals here.

That should be our aid/relief policy for every underdeveloped nation. No food, just birth control.

Contemplationist said...

The best thing that could happen is that to save their behinds from the public pitchforks, the teachers union uses its power to promote HBD explanations thereby making it 'mainstream'. But then the public does not trust the union excuse-making, and chucks them out.

This way, we get rational explanation, as well as save money from public union parasites.

Big Bill said...

One of the puzzling things about Judis' article is its assertion that California is 30th in per-student spending. Without more, these figures are extremely suspect: the typical "amount per student" stats radically underrepresent the total costs.

They do not, for example, include such things as teacher pensions, school construction costs and other long term components.

I believe it was Steve who linked to a report showing that the reported costs were much lower than the actual costs.

As I remember, DC reported per-student costs as $15k per year, but in actuality the costs were $28.5K.

Adding teacher pensions will seriously boost per-student costs. Even worse, however, is the radical underfunding of the teacher pension plans.

States like Cali are promising way more teacher pension and benefit money than they are setting aside.

As a blue-ribbon panel in Cali recently reported, Cali has radically underfunded its pensions by hundreds of billions of dollars using a ludicrous estimated year-after-year ROI of 8% per year.

Even worse, their current portfolios are riddled with rotten mortgage securities that are worth bupkis

With this kind of bookkeeping fraud, ANY honest calculation of or rank ordering of per-student costs is ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

Slightly off topic:

A South African community that remains all white:

http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/news/orania-south-africa-where-apartheid-lives-on--fbintl_lc-orania061510.html

And the people at Y! Sports can't understand why they don't want to deal with the violent blacks...HMMM

When shit finally hits the fan in the U.S....is everyone White person going to be moving to Utah? I know I am.

Anonymous said...

OT, but has anybody seen this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100615/ap_on_el_st_lo/us_voting_rights_election#buzzed=ap/20100615/us_voting_rights_election

Hispanics (and perhaps a few others) are getting 6 votes in a local elections for board of trustees in order to even out the race of their elected representatives. All with the backing of a federal judge.

greenrivervalleyman said...

This is a big turn-around for Judas [sic], who in an article from a couple years back said the border states were going to become bi-cultural as a result of the Hispanic invasion and there was nothing to be done about it except get used to it.

On a side note, though, since most HDB'ers are (philosophical) materialists, why is there no recognition that certainly within the next 50 years we will know enough about which genes account for 100+ IQs to be able to administer genetic "therapy" to our increasingly bronze-hued fellow-citizens?

SFG said...

"I don't think there was ever much anti-Jewish bigotry in the South. They did have a Jewish secretary of war in the Confederacy, after all."

Remember Leo Frank? I think it started with the left-wing Russian Jews coming around the turn of the century. The German Jews before that were relatively conservative, from what I remember...and proud of their superior German culture...

asdfasdfasdfa said...

TNR is prolly the best magazine in America, but politically it is useless. Whatever lessons learned by its staffers and writers, they never do any good.
Recently, TNR gushed about the 'moderate' Elena Kagan!!! What does that tell you?

I read it for movie reviews(by the still amazing Kauffmann who's nearly 100!!!) and excellent book reviews.

ATBOTL said...

"If only someone had written a book about this 16 years ago."

White nationalists have been warning about this for a lot longer than 16 years. But nobody listened. Almost nobody is listening now.

Chief Seattle said...

"And, without an extraordinary infusion of resources,..."

Yup, I'm not the first one to notice this. How CA is going to afford those extraordinary resources as productive industry and people flee is another question. Sort of a virtuous cycle, but in reverse. I think there's a name for that sort of thing.

Anyways, now that California is joining Puerto Rico as the second third-world member of the Union, I'm sure the HBD deniers will come up will all sorts of twisted rationalizations about non-english speakers and school lunch recipients and institutional racism to avoid violating their first axiom.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if California's status could be downgraded from state to territory. It would reduce the Federal welfare liability for California's poor Mexicans. Of course, aggressive steps would need to be taken to prevent them from just switching their residence to other states.

As a gay employee in the garden center of my Home Depot once said to me,"One month, a few appear, then a year later, the place is simply overrun. (lowering his voice) Jesus, they're like cockroaches."

keypusher said...

One of the puzzling things about Judis' article is its assertion that California is 30th in per-student spending. Without more, these figures are extremely suspect: the typical "amount per student" stats radically underrepresent the total costs.

Yes, it would be nice to see real numbers -- I've seen other sources put California 50th in per-student spending.

Others have pointed out that Judis' bottom line is higher taxes. I just noticed the following:

It is also not to say that non-English-speaking immigrant kids are unteachable. But they are more difficult to teach, especially when their parents aren't high school graduates.

He doesn't see that it isn't just a first-generation problem. Mass Mexican-Central American immigration would be much less of an issue if it were.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:

""A create a diversion, blame the money grubbing corporations, www.ClosetheLoophole.com ""


"However, it won't work. All the money in the world won't close the achievement gap. LA school district spends $27K per student per year. That is enough money to have teacher tutor each kid one on one for over 3.5 hours a day and pay her $50k a year."



Yes, I know it won't work.

Middle of the road voices need to speak more loudly that we simply do not have "an extraordinary infusion of resources at the moment" to educate kids that have no family history of education. Therefore, we need to limit immigration to skilled workders. We need to speak out that we need enforcement and clear policies on these issues.

It's simple.

That's what Arizona is doing.

That's what California needs to do.

There needs to be a clear and reasonable voice to oppose those (Teacher's Union, etc.) that aren't speaking out on this issue.

-pd in sf

Anonymous said...

i find you disgusting and evil and i'm glad that you're on the losing side.

Jim said...

Optomistic to call this "better late".

He's just observing reality, pretty much at the level of all these Jewish lefties -- they know exactly what's going on, and they order there housing, schooling, wifing choices accordingly -- but there is an intense ideological orthodoxy.

But after a few sniffs are at reality, he blames ... the Republicans! In a state that's basically owned lock stock and barrel by the Democrats and has enacted exactly their program -- high taxes, public sector unions, "diversity', PC, etc. etc.

The problem ... not enough wise liberalism directed by folks like John Judis!

TMTCTMTSTS

David Davenport said...

regarding Jewish people in the Old south:

The Jewish Confederates (NS) [Hardcover]
Robert N. Rosen
Robert N. Rosen (Author)



4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While prominent, largely forgotten Jewish leaders such as Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and Q.M. Gen. Abraham C. Myers are re-examined in Rosen's account of the Jewish confederacy, the real contribution of this book to Civil War scholarship is its thorough look at the contradictions and ironies implied by the title, and the capsule biographical sketches of quite a few of the 2,000 Jewish men who served in the Confederate army and navy.

Looking at the total Southern Jewish population of less than 25,000 based mainly in the cities of Memphis, Nashville, Mobile and Shreveport Rosen concludes that, contrary to the commonly held idea of "old" Jewish families being the mainstay of the contingent, the typical Jewish soldier was a recent immigrant who "enlisted to prove he was a man and a worthy citizen" albeit a citizen sometimes subject to prejudices just as virulent as anti-black racism. In addition to tracking the exploits of many soldiers, Rosen also chronicles the trials and tribulations of Jewish civilians behind the lines and the growth of anti-Semitism as the war progressed. This groundbreaking study is liberally illustrated with photographs and maps, and is written clearly and energetically as a trade book, despite its academic stamp and thoroughness.

http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Confederates-Robert-N-Rosen/dp/1570033633/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276728680&sr=1-1

Anonymous said...

>i find you disgusting and evil and i'm glad that you're on the losing side.<

Keep those cards and letters coming.

Anonymous said...

Hey keypusher,

We're on the same page.

I read a study somewhere that indicates that Latinos have the least upward mobility of any US immigrant group. Apparently, as far as can be measured, poverty is persisting even in third generation Latino families.

Unlike many people blogging here, I think the problem is cultural.

Teachers do know what is going on. A highschool teacher friend of mine, who teaches at San Mateo Highschool in the Bay Area, tells me all about it. The Asian kids go home. It's a short conversion, dinner and then homework.

With the Latino kids, every night is party night. There is simply no encouragement to do homework. And there is tremendous encouragement to have children, even as young as forteen or fifteen. Also, there is no discussion of birth control. When kids become sexually active, the parents deny what is going on.

My teacher friend loses about half of her Latino students, who drop out when they have a baby.

alexis said...

I've been helping my assistant principal (secretly) work on her presentation that she'll have before the school board as part of her applying to be our new principal. The format of the presentation demands that an applicant spend the entire time (15 minutes) with testing data, interpreting it, and explaining how one will build his/her leadership around the "school needs that the data reflects".

Gap closing is the unstated point, of course. We're the English as a Second language school for the district, with a 30% Afro-American population. As the ESL kids are all part of a new foreign influx, they don't have the political pull yet, so the black demographic is the unstated focus. My assistant principal and I discussed whether bringing up the fact that we'll be getting 100 more ESL kids this year, which the other candidates and probably the interviewing board does not know about, should be a part of this stats-based presentation, i.e. her attention getter. Since the guy who will probably be the real decider on who becomes the principal is black, and race obsessed, it could either be a strike for or against her, since it will throw a wrench in the unstated narrative (We've got to close the black/white gap).

Anonymous said...

re: the cockroach comment. That is so unPC true-funny.

With the whole SF sanctuary city thing, I've been wondering if there would be a huge influx of escapees from Arizona to our fair city in the next few months. Apparently, we're supposed to be one of the destinations of choice.

Well, I had my first sighting last night.

A junked-out spray painted uhaul moving monstrosity. The guy was clearly very Latino. Just sitting there with his schmatas. Sitting there, in the middle of the Castro, like he'd hit sanctuary city Nirvana.

-pd in sf

couchscientist said...

OT: Study finds differences in facial shape between blue and brown eyed white men. Brown eyed perceived as more dominant even when eye color altered.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/brown-eyes-dominant-100615.html

portia said...

On a side note, though, since most HDB'ers are (philosophical) materialists, why is there no recognition that certainly within the next 50 years we will know enough about which genes account for 100+ IQs to be able to administer genetic "therapy" to our increasingly bronze-hued fellow-citizens?

If HDB'ers are such materialists, they should spend more time screwing women and having babies, and less time devising Strangelovian scenarios to depopulate the planet.

Anonymous said...

"Of course israel doesn't need this sort of diversity because jews value education and thus, have better restaurant and engineers."

Israel is desperate for every variety of immigrant who claims Jewish ancestry and is willing to live in a settlement.

They are taking thousands from Northeast India (Burmese looking) even and turning them into citizens.

They don't want blacks though. There are many Ethiopians still waiting. The Israelis gave a definite no.

Anonymous said...

"too little, too late... California is lost, the country is lost... it was good while it lasted. At least we can analyze and complain at iSteve..."

There's always Central Europe. Maybe I should get an English teaching job there.

Anonymous said...

The most blatant anti-Jewish act of the War Between the States was Ulysses S. Grant's General Order No. 11 in 1862, expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

One of the earliest Jewish settlements in North America was in Charleston, South Carolina. These were Sephardic Jews from Holland. As an indication of their social standing, the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, founded in Charleston in 1801, included at least two members of this ancient community. The best society of Charleston accepted them.

The father of the financier, speculator, and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, Dr. Simon Baruch, a German Jewish immigrant, married a Sephardic woman from South Carolina. Dr. Baruch became a surgeon on the staff of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Bernard Baruch was born in Camden, S.C. in 1870. I believe at least some of his ancestors had been slaveholders.

The first Ku Klux Klan had no particular antipathy to Jews. It was primarily concerned with resisting the Union military occupation, carpetbagging politicians, and the black militias they organized to harass and oppress the local whites. It was ordered to disband in 1869 by Gen. Forrest, who was acclaimed its first Grand Wizard.

The second Klan, founded in 1915, was much less regionally Southern (it had strong branches in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Oregon) and was as much nativist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish as it was anti-negro. These political positions, as well as much of what we associate today with the Klan, such as its fiery cross ritual and its stereotypical robes, were original to this second Klan and should not be attributed to the first one. All subsequent organizations calling themselves Ku Klux Klan or some variant on that theme have been much more influenced by this second organization than they were by the initial one of the late 1860s and early '70s.

Anonymous said...

elvisd:

i've following a blog for the last year where san francisco school board insiders have discussed their inner most thoughts on the achievement gap. [www.rachelnorton.com]

School board types (your "decider" probably included), always try to pitch the achievement gap as if it were a black/white gap. It's the most untouchable.

if you mention the 100 incoming ESL students, I wouldn't overplay it.

-pd in sf

Toadal said...

pd in sf said:
A junked-out spray painted uhaul moving monstrosity. The guy was clearly very Latino. Just sitting there with his schmatas. Sitting there, in the middle of the Castro, like he'd hit sanctuary city Nirvana.

Hey, we could give Mike Sugarman of KCBS a call to dash out the Castro for an family interview and bring our valued refugees a gift basket and a map to Mayor Gavin "Whether you like it or not!" Newsome's home.

Mike can regale KCBS weekday commuters 'Around the Bay' regarding the valiant Arizona refugees forced to flee their adopted homeland by the 'Blue-Eyed Devils' of Tempe, Arizona. There's something unseemly about KCBS leftist spin being listened to by heavily taxed Asian and white engineers while they are trapped in their cars on their morning commute.

BTW, Mike can respond more rapidly now since KCBS can no longer afford to have a cameraman accompany him everywhere. Mr Sugarman has become his own cameraman.

Fred said...

I stand corrected. It seems that Jews did face some discrimination in the South.

Anonymous said...

To -pd in sf:

Please keep up your dispatches from the People's Republic of San Francisco. I really enjoy them.

Anonymous said...

"If HDB'ers are such materialists, they should spend more time screwing women and having babie"

I'm sure a lot of people here would like to but most are hopeless with women.

Anonymous said...

pd in sf, how did you end up being a pd in a city like sf? I couldn't imagine being a hbd realists and dealing with the kind of co-workers at that office.

eh said...

I read it on the CNN web site:

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster Tuesday night was written at a 10th-grade level, which, according to analysts, may have gone over the heads of many in his audience.

I smell a SNL skit.

Anonymous said...

"Are weaker students more expensive to educate than gifted students?"


To reach the same level on criterion referenced state achievement tests, it takes weaker students ten years and gifted students about five years. The weaker students get smaller classes while gifted students are in larger classes. Schools like gifted programs because they are so very cheap to run and the kids don't make problems.

So, each dumb kid costs at least four times as much to get to the same minimum measured competency level. This is just back of the envelope calculation based on smaller class size and number of years to reach minimum measured competence.

Anonymous said...

The study mentioned above about the lack of progress in assimilation/education is likely the one noted here:

http://www.cis.org/ImmigrantParadox

FWIW, natives have been leaving CA in droves since the early 90's at least. It continues to grow only because of the massive influx of immigrants - legal & illegal. I suspect that the loss of the families that helped make CA the Golden State earlier have really dinged the tax base at the same time that the unskilled/uneducated immigrants drove up the need for services.

The US and the several states will soon have no alternative but to grapple with the hard fact that there isn't "more money". We are living on credit as it is. That a simple infusion of "more money" wouldn't solve the problem anyway is obvious to all but the most casual observer.

Anonymous said...

portia: If HDB'ers are such materialists, they should spend more time screwing women and having babies, and less time devising Strangelovian scenarios to depopulate the planet.

Who is Portia?

And does anyone have her phone number?

Thanks.

keypusher said...

I read a study somewhere that indicates that Latinos have the least upward mobility of any US immigrant group. Apparently, as far as can be measured, poverty is persisting even in third generation Latino families.

Here's our host's column on the subject.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080601_barone.htm

Unlike many people blogging here, I think the problem is cultural.

I think it's cultural and biological, like most human phenomena. Suppose the Hispanic population of California really does have an average IQ of 87 or 90, normally distributed. For the bulk of that population, academic study aimed any higher than a high school diploma is going to be a waste of time. For a lot of them, even a high school diploma is going to be a real reach.

I can't find it now, but Steve did a long column in maybe 2004 on SAT scores in California. Bottom line was that there were huge numbers of Hispanic kids who could no more hope to handle a real four-year college than they could expect to leap over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Anonymous said...

Wikipedia says that Alexander Hamilton, via a Huguenot mother, had a Jewish step-father, and attended a Jewish elementary school in the Caribbean.

It's hard to see how any "Middle-Man" [or community of middle-men, large enough to support their own school system] could have survived in those historical environs without having been heavily invested in the Triangular Trade.

Anonymous said...

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster Tuesday night was written at a 10th-grade level, which, according to analysts, may have gone over the heads of many in his audience.

Yeah, I meant to email Steve a link to this piece:

Obama Speaks At Lower Grade Level Than Bush, CNN Says He's 'Too Professorial'
By Noel Sheppard
Thu, 06/17/2010
newsbusters.org

The weird thing is that Obama usually speaks at about a seventh or eighth grade level, but the TOTUS upped it to about the tenth grade level, in order to try to explain the insanity of cap-n-tax.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

keypusher said...

Here is the other piece...it was from 2007, not 2004.

http://vdare.com/sailer/070128_scores.htm

Anonymous said...

Hey, Anonymous,

It's not all crazy here in the People's Republic.

The tide's been low every morning on Ocean Beach these last few days.

Glorious!

Sand and waves forever.

I'm glad it's still there. I was getting worried a few months ago when they were thinking of putting more drilling platforms off the coast.

There's was an interesting article on VDARE yesterday: "Gulf Coast Oil Disaster: The (Immigration) Moratorium Option".

On a different note, there's an interesting article in the SF Bay Guardian that came out this morning:

"Voters are Pissed."
http://www.sfbg.com/2010/06/15/voters-are-pissed

No kidding.

I don't agree with the article that Meg Whitman is the Antichrist, but the observation that there is an interesting race between Gruesome Newsom and Abel Maldonado is insightful.

-pd in sf

Anonymous said...

Hey keypusher,

For me, it's not effective to focus on IQs.

What is effective is to focus on the cost that a particular group imposes now and in the future.

The problem with certain racial groups is that they do not carry their weight, economically speaking. It doesn't matter why that is.

And it's quite clear that bootstrapping an entire culture with a history of downward mobility is extremely costly.

It's standard policy in most western industrialized countries to limit immigration where a group has been shown to not pull their economic weight.

For some reason, up to now, California has continued to think that it can defy gravity.

-pd in sf

chris said...

I've been a California Community College instructor for the past 14 years. Believe it or not the majority of the students in our district are white and Asian and they are thick as bricks. Wave upon wave of barely literate, innumerate 18 year-olds (with H.S. diplomas) wasting three, four, even five years of tax-payer subsidized education only to ultimately drop-out for good.

Students pay around $300 for 12 units. The state pays us more than $4000 for each 12 unit student equivalent. That $3700-plus subsidy comes with zero accountability. In other words students sign up for classes and then drop mid-semester, for any reason at all, without penalty, and the tax-payer ponies up. Attrition rates are sky high.

Our college has just over 10,000 students. Each May a mere 250 to 300 students graduate. More than 50% of these students receive a worthless Liberal Arts degrees. On average it takes a Liberal Arts student 3.5 years to complete an AA. And you all know that this is essentially a degree in Howard Zinn's "A People's History..."

Our nurses have accents. Our plumbers have accents. Our mechanics have accents. Our carpenters have accents. Millions of California Community College drop-outs speak without accent.

What ruined California was killing vocational training programs back in the 70's.

Anonymous said...

pd in sf - It's standard policy in most western industrialized countries to limit immigration where a group has been shown to not pull their economic weight.


That sounds very sensible. I fear it isnt true though, we have the same immigration insanity here in the UK as in the US.

Our experiment with enriching vibrancy began in 1948 and has accelerated ever since. 60 years on, its patently obvious that some groups cannot pull their weight, but that doesnt stop tptb.

I suspect its little different anywhere else in Europe, after all we have the EU in control of much of immigration policy.

ben tillman said...

Remember Leo Frank?

Yeah, he killed a 12-year-old girl and was found guilty. How does that support your point?

ben tillman said...

One of the earliest Jewish settlements in North America was in Charleston, South Carolina. These were Sephardic Jews from Holland. As an indication of their social standing, the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, founded in Charleston in 1801, included at least two members of this ancient community. The best society of Charleston accepted them.


From the preface of The Jews of Charleston by Reznikoff and Engelman (1950):

If anti-Semitism is the result of Jewish conspicuousness -- be mere number, as in Poland before World War II, or by achievement as in germany -- in Charleston the Jews were numerous, many were distinguished, and yet all were free to serve their city and state and were honored for it by those who had only citizenship in common with them. It has been said, moreover, that in a friendly, but non-Jewish, environment Jews are assimilated -- intermarry and are no longer Jews. In Charleston, there are descendants of the earliest Jewish families, and they are still Jews.

ben tillman said...

From Murray Friedman's Virginia Jewry in the School Crisis: Anti-Semitism and Desegregation in Jews in the South, edited by Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson (1973):

Until now [meaning the period of desegregation spearheaded by Northern Jews] anti-Semitism has scarcely figured as a problem.

Anonymous said...

I'm in the Great White North near the Canadian border, without even many Indians in our public schools, and there seems to be plenty of white trash willing to take the place of minorities in taking easy classes, flunking out, getting knocked up and going on welfare. Just sayin.

Anyway, I have a stepson with a Spanish surname though he's probably only 1/8...he is very bright, and moved to Cali and used the CC and UC system to get an MD and is now happily ensconced with the VA.

I wonder if he is counted as an Hispanic "success story"?

Anonymous said...

he's probably only 1/8

1/8th what?

Castilian/Hapsburgian Caucasian?

Or Central/North-American Aboriginal?

Roger Chaillet said...

So, dysgenics is on the rise in the white population?

Sweet!

The Apocalypse will come sooner than I had expected.

Marc B said...

"There were restricted hotels, real estate covenants, and the Klu Klux Klan to deal with but otherwise..."

Most of those restrictions were also in place in in the North and Midwest, because the WASP establishment was always picky about whom it chose to mix and mingle with. The Klan wasn't too keen on Catholic's either.

The Jews have comprised a successful merchant class in the South, even in small towns, and were barely on Southerners radar because there were so few of them until the Northeastern Jews traveled southbound on the freedom trains spreading social justice.

Anonymous said...

"About 60% of the kids in the city are on "school lunch" and are "english language learners", which means they go to the head of the line and get first dibs at the best schools."

I thought San Francisco was a pertty wealthy city with few low income people? I wish I could live there. Maybe I make too much to be subsidized, but not enough to able to afford it on my own.

How come all these foreigners get to take over San Francisco and California in general? We blew it.

Anonymous said...

""However, it won't work. All the money in the world won't close the achievement gap. LA school district spends $27K per student per year. That is enough money to have teacher tutor each kid one on one for over 3.5 hours a day and pay her $50k a year."


Maybe we should close the schools and have the teachers go to the kid's house. We need to rethink schools altogether.

Anonymous said...

spreading social justice

I hope that was tongue-in-cheek.

Anonymous said...

"I thought San Francisco was a pertty wealthy city with few low income people? I wish I could live there. Maybe I make too much to be subsidized, but not enough to able to afford it on my own."

About 20% of kids in San Francisco don't actually live in San Francisco. Many commute from out of the city to take advantage of the better schools. It's not legal, but the SFUSD doesn't enforce the city residency requirement.

The family income numbers for "school lunch", which gives you go-to-the-head-of-the-line status, is 20K-40K. However, many families are not exactly truthful about their true family income. In my experience, there are a lot of families with an undeclared income in the $80-$120K range which is earned off the books. (No income tax and able to qualify their kids for free lunch public school front-of-the-line status.)

The federal government recently put San Francisco on free lunch probation for having so many kids questionably on the program.

There does seem to be some racial bias in whether or not the city turns a blind eye to this type of malfeasance.

It's resulted in some dramatic numbers in who attends public school in San Francisco.

Less than 8% of public school kids are black. 40% are Asian. 40% are Latino. 10% are white.

Fully 3/4 of white kids in the city are sent to private or parochial school.

The official line from the school board is that white families don't want to send their kids to school with other races in public school.

That's true in some cases, but the greater truth is that they simply can't get there kids into a good public school.

-pd in sf

Anonymous said...

Leo Frank didn't kill Mary Phagan. It was the janitor.

Anonymous said...

Even the likes of Henry Ford thought that Leo Frank was innocent.

Anonymous said...

Leo Frank's conviction held up to the Supreme Court. The accusations of jury intimidation were vapor.

Here is what the noble defense attorney said in his closing statement, trying to throw guilt on the terrified black janitor: "Who is Conley? He is a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying, n*gger." Bellowed in open court - at a Georgia jury that didn't buy it.

But Georgians are "racists," while the ADL avant la lettre is Atticus Finch.

(source of quotation: Levy, Eugene (2000), "Is the Jew a White Man?", in Adams, Maurianne; Bracey, John H., Strangers & Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks & Jews in the United States, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, ISBN 1-55849-236-4.)

Unknown said...

Henry Ford, as I noted (but forgot to sign in) believed that Frank was innocent.

And Oliver Wendell Holmes, who dissented re the Supreme Court verdict, wrote that, "I very seriously doubt if the petitioner ... has had due process of law ... because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered."