Please say that this isn’t true.
Why would you want to dumb down an entire school district and shackle the smartest kids from excelling in their educational pursuits?
Anecdotally, if students (and others) aren’t challenged in their lives, they become complacent, try drugs, crime, etc.
Why not support the best and brightest to lead us all into the future?
Don’t we owe that to our children?

This is an unfortunate turn of events for the NAACP.
It seems that they have lost their way. It’s unfortunate.

[...] [...]

The NAACP needs to make sure that all students have access to the preparation necessary for advanced level courses and that black students are encouraged to excel. The NAACP needs to promote among teachers and students higher expectations of black students. Low expectations leads to low results. Some black children do not even know that they should do well. Some may have experienced punishment for doing well. I’ve been there. Black children just like other children need direction and guidance. Teachers need to let black students know that they are expected to do well and teach them like they should be taught.. You’ll experience better results..

“LOL”, you’re kidding, right? The leveling programs are race neutral. The kids self-select themselves into their appropriate levels.

The real racism is that – in general – blacks always deliberately mass themselves into the low achievement levels and always avoid the high achievement levels.

They should be sued for that!

What a ridiculous thing for the NAACP to do and what a disaster this will be for the home owners. The black kids should be getting direction and encouragement at home like the white kids do and many other minorities. That is why they can’t place in the Level 4 classes. Their parents and community have failed them and now the NAACP is going to even the score and ruin a school district and a community.

Better put your homes on the market now in South Orange and Maplewood.

It’s funny, most of these comments can be construed as racist.

Let’s review the facts:
..”SOMSD students are placed in levels based on their scores on the state standardized test, teacher recommendations and grades..”

Now, if it was grades alone, that makes it a level playing field. There are other variables, as well as the very strange coincidence that the lower level are children of color.

Im pretty appalled it was suggested that these kids aren’t getting encouragement from home. I can tell you, from experience, I grew up in a mostly black town in Long Island, where the school district was extremely underfunded. I ended up relocating to a well of high school in central florida. The difference? The LI high school had a lower grad rate but much higher percentage of kids who went to college than the (mostly white) Florida school.

I think the lawsuit deserves merit IF they have completed necessary studies to prove the black students are disadvantaged.

Final thought.. I graduated HS in 96, undergrad in ’99 and grad school in 2001. Why is high school calculus so important anyways?

Discrimination…the all around dirty word to describe lack of parenting, laziness and entitlement.

Do you know that if we continue to dumb the requirements down in the American classroom anymore, we will have created a body of students who can’t even match those in third world countries where children are using an abacus and stones for chalk? No lie! My daughter had to read a book for school this summer called “Freckle Juice”. She read it in the car from the library to the house; a fifteen minute ride. And this is what they consider challenging a soon to be 3rd grader?

When she got home she continued to read the Harry Potter series of books which her school told her was for 5th graders only but which I got her for her birthday. Why? Because any reading material a child shows interest in should be encouraged (with the exception of porn and indiscriminate violence of course). No-one wants to say what should be shouted from the roof tops. The responsibility of education ultimately lies with the parents. My daughter has to read and do math projects during her summer vacation; not because the school said so but because we, as her parents, say so! Give me a child; black, white, Asian, Indian or Spanish who has involved parents and I will give you a great student who doesn’t have to worry about where they are being placed because they’ll always be in the right place!

And that’s all I have to say about that!