On another site, people were discussing correct grammar, then ebonics, and before you know it, whether black students can learn as well as white students. I assume everybody has heard this debate many times. I suspect that the debate itself is propaganda. There are buried sophistries and hidden agenda. People are missing a very important point. Here it is:

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I want to discuss a perspective that may surprise people on all sides of this debate.

As I've written about education, I've discovered (to my own satisfaction) that our Education Establishment is wrong on almost every theory and method. More to the point here, they are opportunistic bullies. What that means in practice is this: if a community won't defend itself, our Education Establishment will walk right over it. 

It doesn't have to do with being black. That's a red herring and is confusing lots of people. It's the same for poor whites. It's the same for ANY community that's busy with making a living and in general not paying attention.

For example, the entire United States – yes, that's a community— was the victim of a fraud in the 1930's known as look-say. But there were communities all over the US which said no, this is stupid, we're not going along with it. So there were always pockets of phonics where parents resisted. Lucky for them. Recently, the Education Establishment tried to walk over the entire country with Common Core. Many people are resisting. Lucky for them.

So I would like to generalize what we Americans are up against here: whenever a community (small or large) is weak, uninformed, passive, or gullible, the Education Establishment will make them into victims. Every bad gimmick ever devised will be pushed into the schools. The students will seem to get dumber.

Just recently I was working on an article about recess and discovered the most extraordinary thing. Many schools with the LEAST time devoted to recess are in black communities. Think about that for a while and you know everything. (Keep those kids stationary, let the tensions build up, then diagnose them as ADHD, give them Ritalin— my God, how the money rolls in. And wouldn't we guess that Democrats get more voters?)

All of the above is why I'm so profoundly disappointed in black leaders, as well as Christian leaders and every other kind of leaders. They seem to be passive when we desperately need active.

If you know any black leaders, please send them this comment.