Wy is it that Calfornia’s educational elite so consistently undermines and underserves the very people it is supposed to educate? From the Oakland School District’s appropriately ridiculed Eubonics (set your spellchecker to use “Ebonics!” — ed.) debacle to the more recent decision to dump Reed Hastings from the State Board of Education, California consistently fails the common sense test when making educational decision. The move to dump Hastings from the Educational Board was led by Senator Martha Escutia who was upset that Mr. Hastings (a life long Democratic and signficant donor to the party) had actually suggested that Californian students receive a minumum of 2-1/2 hours of English instruction a day. How dare he propose such a radical idea? Is it possible that he has seen the positive effects of integrating children into English-only instruction versus the disasterous effects of postponing such integration? Mr. Hastings motivations were clear. It is too bad that Escutia’s myopic zeal to play to the lowest common demoninator of her voting constituancy (a la Al Sharpton) will hurt those very people the most.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 at 7:23 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.