I heard a comment about this little gem of leftist thought while on the road today:

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
By Eric Klein

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.

Seriously? I guess they’re really serious about this. Let’s delve a little further:

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.

This, folks, is the logical result of “No Child Left Behind” a program resulting from George Bush being “bi-partisan” with Teddy “Swim, bitch!” Kennedy. and I have said many times, the only way to insure that no child gets left behind is to make sure that you run the race really slow. Like this.

racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse

Not being a “professional educator”, I will venture a guess that in any venue worth considering, white students will do better than the average and black and Latino students will do worse. Treating people as groups, the Liberal way of doing things, you’d naturally assume (another liberal trait) that this is due to some bias in the system that benefits white students.

I got some news. You really want to see a bias? Peel out the Asians for a little pass under the numerical microscope and you’ll see they’re beating the whites in most venues, too, where there are enough of them to count.

But that’s GROUPS. So there MUST be something wrong with the system.

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.

Sure it’s almost unanimous. Just like voting to take MY money and give it to the underachievers in society as a whole because they’re “losers in life’s lottery”, now we’ll do it with education.

Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. “The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School’s science department, at last week’s school board meeting.

But those science classes are so mysterious, huh? I mean, they all about facts and stuff and it’s hard for people to understand. Besides, half the stuff they show is wrong anyway because it’s not like that on TV, right?

Sincular-Mertens, who has taught science at BHS for 24 years, said the possible cuts will impact her black students as well. She says there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino. “As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need to find satisfaction and success in their education,” she told the board.

Now that’s what’s known as an inconvenient truth: The classes are “AP”, i.e., “Advanced Placement”. You have to score well to get in. That’s like “merit”, you know, where just because somebody works hard and has capabilities he has an opportunity to get more out of life. we can’t be having stuff like that, you know.

The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at its January 13 meeting. Generally, such agenda items are passed without debate, but if the school board chooses to play a more direct role in the High School Redesign, it could bring the item back as an action item at a future meeting.

It’s not a “racial” achievement gap. It’s an individual achievement gap. You let kids into the class based on a number. The number doesn’t care black, brown or white. The number IS. And in that class, kids who’ve stretched, shown potential to learn above the herd, those kids, they’re stretched and exercised even more.

But when the leftists and the “professional educators” (but I repeat myself) look inside one of those classes, they don’t see kids who have potential and work hard, they see too many white kids and not enough black kids and Latino kids.

This bothers the Left, and their solution is to slow down the front-runners so that no child is left behind. The Left is quite happy to put blinders on young Todd and Alicia, shutting down THEIR chance to gain more of the tools needed to vault upward into careers in medicine and engineering and science, just so they can make sure that little Secretia and Pablo can get a meaningless high school diploma.

This is a new route to the death of a civilization, folks! I cannot think of a time in history where failing to give the VERY BEST to the brightest minds was deliberate policy. But here it is, not without surprise, coming out of California, where every crazed liberal idea takes root.