Berzerkley

Per the OCED, the US already spends the most dollars per student yet only rank average among OCED countries. Now Berkeley is going to drag us down even more.

East Bay Express

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
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.

Unanimous?! Are they crazy... I guess you gotta be to live in Berkeley. Last time I checked, public school performance by ethnic group in California is pretty consistent everywhere: Asian > White > Hispanic/Latino > African American. I've had many discussions on why this may be the case but I'll leave that for another post. The data suggests that the racial disparity is a statewide (or even nationwide) problem and throwing more money at it won't help. Surely the solution is not to drag everyone down to the level of the lowest achiever... or is it? This is the People's Republic of Berkeley after all.

I read somewhere that the UC system is short on money as well since a lot of their funds come from the State of California. From personal experience, the engineering programs at all the top UC schools are basically all White or Asian, and also 99% male. Hey, I know... let cut those "racist" programs so we can fund remedial reading and math for all those affirmative action students. Stupid...