Wednesday, March 16, 2005

A LEFTIST KU KLUX KLAN: SECRET RACIAL TEACHINGS

The Guilford County Schools invited the public to attend an anti-racism workshop held for teachers, parents and community leaders last week, but refused to allow a reporter to stay in the room once he was identified as such. In fact, Crossroads Ministry, who held the seminar, has such clout that the second day, a reporter was thrown out after Guilford County School Superintendent Terry Grier had given permission for him to attend. Considering what they were teaching at this seminar, which teachers from Southwest, Andrews and High Point Central high schools were required to attend, it is no wonder they didn’t want a reporter present.

The participant manual used by Crossroads Ministry is not only outdated, talking about understanding racism in the 1990s, but it also contains some pretty strong statements regarding racism and white people, such as, “Racism is the collective actions of a dominant racial group,” and “Every system and every institution in the US was created originally and structured legally and intentionally to serve white people exclusively.” Crossroads Ministry also identifies ways in which racism “misuses power,” some of which are “Racism’s power over People of Color,” and “Racism’s power to preserve and maintain power and privilege for white society.” According to Crossroads, white people are the only ones capable of being racist, which sounds pretty racist in its own right.

At one point during the workshop on Friday, the participants were placed in different rooms according to skin color – all the white people in one room and all the non-whites in another. Rev. Charles Ruehle, executive co-director of Crossroads Ministry, who is white, met with the white participants and introduced them to “internalized racial superiority,” defined as a “process that teaches White people to believe, accept and/or live out superior societal definitions of self and to fit into and live out superior societal roles.” The ultimate outcome of this is, according to Ruehle, “white supremacy.”

Ruehle made a comment during the segregated discussion that blacks have more to fear from whites that don’t recognize their inherent racism than from neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Anne Stewart, a trainer for Crossroads Ministry, who is black, met with the black participants and discussed what Crossroads calls “internalized racial oppression,” which is defined in the participant manual as a “process that teaches People of Color to believe, accept and/or live out negative, societal definitions of self to fit into and live out inferior societal roles.” During the discussion, Stewart stated that many black families encourage their children to marry light-skinned mates to lighten their complexion, and she also blamed black-on-black crimes on white society instilling a sense of worthlessness in blacks......

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POLITICALLY CORRECT MEDICAL SCHOOL ADMISSION

A system that discriminates against ability and in favour of cheats

"Finding a fair way of rationing scarce resources is always hard. When the resource is education and the prize is a place in medical school, the rationing process needs to be far more plausible and transparent than it generally is in Australian universities.

This column is primarily about the University of Adelaide, where the admissions process has been a long-running scandal. It may perhaps be the most egregious example, but it is by no means the only one. The undergraduate medicine and health sciences admissions test, UMAT, and screening interviews are nationwide phenomena. Once upon a time, admission to med school was a fairly straightforward matter, decided on matriculation scores. Students with a negligible grasp of English or with psychiatric problems - two salient non-academic criteria for exclusion - could mostly be informally discouraged.

It was in 1996 - the era when a place in med school came to be seen as an entitlement - that other tests supplanted matriculation scores. Adelaide University strenuously denies it, but many say the original impetus was to prevent the intake from being inundated with industrious Chinese and Vietnamese students. Once other factors could override academic results, overt and covert forms of discrimination became part of an increasingly opaque process. It was a variation on Shakespeare's lines about disrupting hierarchical order: "Take but degree away, untune that string,/And, hark! what discord follows." The equal opportunity brigade made the usual ambit claims for women and students from rural schools, claims that in the politically correct 1990s seemed unchallengeable.

Other grounds for covert discrimination have been canvassed. As the South Australian president of the Australian Medical Association, William Heddle, said: "It is interesting to note children of doctors and private school students seem to have great difficulty getting into the medical school despite excellent academic scores and personal qualities. We have great concern it may be happening for ideological reasons."

In 2004, Judith Sloan, a labour-market economist, complained to local media. Her daughter Lucinda, rejected despite a tertiary entrance rank score of 99.9, was forced to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. "We are speaking out for other families who will be facing this situation in the future. The people we are losing interstate are not just academically gifted; they are well rounded. People have been trying to get some accountability about the entry system. Entry systems vary but only Adelaide puts such reliance on UMAT and interviews - it is an absolute joke."

Peter Cameron, an Adelaide general practitioner, is also a vocal critic. His son Alexander is another GPS student with a TER score of 99.9 who was forced to go to Melbourne University's med school. Cameron is up in arms at the way the interview system and its levelling effects discriminate against privately educated students, particularly those with spirit and leadership ability, in favour of more passive, malleable types. He says: "I fail to see how a test of dubious significance followed by a 20-minute interview of a nervous adolescent can better predict the quality of a doctor after 10 more years of training than a TER score which reflects years of hard work. At least half a dozen of the state's brightest students are forced to go elsewhere every year to do medicine because in Adelaide mere merit is not enough."

Aaron Russell, another candidate with a TER score in the high 90s who's vice-president of the Adelaide University Union, was weeded out by the UMAT tests and didn't even get to the interview stage. He did well enough on the IQ tests but failed in the hypothetical section on "interaction skills". He says: "I didn't choose warm, fuzzy answers or assume that the patient is always right."

The university, painfully aware of its public relations problems, likes to wheel out the big guns in its defence. For example, Bruce Dowton, dean of medicine at the University of NSW, is often cited for commending Adelaide's process as "an objective, reliable and equitable way of selecting medical students". Dowton probably believes what he's saying, but it's nonetheless plain that no evaluative interview of candidates can, of its very nature, be objective. It's not an impersonal process; nor is it value-neutral. Because the criteria for selecting some students and rejecting others aren't explicit and the medical faculty is so secretive about these interviews, they are widely regarded as tainted and inequitable. Dowton is also mistaken if he imagines that the process is reliable. It can no longer be depended on even to produce any of the various social engineering outcomes it was apparently designed to further. A cottage industry has emerged, offering very expensive courses to help would-be medical students become familiar with UMAT and to outsmart the interviewers.

If your children need strategies to disguise their background and postcode, or coaching in how to wear a baseball cap back to front convincingly, why not search Google for medical-entrance. com.au? The Icarus College can help. (As an aside, it's an unfortunate choice of name. These days I suppose not many young people know about poor Icarus, the figure in classical mythology who flew on waxen wings that melted when he got too close to the sun. But I digress.) If your hapless offspring haven't yet learned to affect ever-so-progressive social values whenever they're expected, or perhaps just a hint of fashionable sexual ambivalence, you may need to enrol them in a more personalised, intensive course.

This farcical, market-driven development has not gone unnoticed in Adelaide's med school. We can be confident about that because in January Tony Davis, a senior lecturer in clinical psychiatry, wrote a letter about it to the dean of medicine, Derek Frewin. "I have discovered that the majority of 'successful' entrants to medical schools in Australia have completed a UMAT preparation course. In 2004, approximately 500 of the 900 first-year students completed a course offered by Dallas Medical Entrance, one of the most popular courses on offer. There are several other courses available in each state. Dallas Gibson states that 50 per cent of his course participants have been 'successful' in recent years, compared with 10-15 per cent of national applicants," Davis wrote. "It is clear that students are being trained to answer the UMAT questions and to respond to the interview in a well-rehearsed fashion. Dallas also states that students are cautioned about disclosure of certain personal details, [for example], being from a medical family, being a school leader, being from a private school. He is keen to begin the 'education process' with students in Year 10, to ensure they are 'well and truly prepared' for the selection procedures at the end of Year 12."

Davis noted in passing that "for several years many colleagues have expressed concerns about the lack of validation of the UMAT and lack of reliability of the interview". He concluded by saying: "I understand that the medical faculty in Adelaide is still telling students (and their families) that you cannot prepare for the UMAT and interview, and continue to discourage participation in such courses. I consider this is bad advice and that if this selection process continues, all interested students should be encouraged to enrol in a preparatory course in Year 11 at least. This is the only way to try to 'level the playing field', in what I believe is a very inequitable and ill-conceived process of selection."

When reforming the system becomes inevitable, the authorities should have a look at "A Levels and Intelligence as Predictors of Medical Careers in UK Doctors: 20 Year Prospective Study" (I.C. McManus and others, British Medical Journal, July 2003), which found matriculation scores far better predictors of success in studying medicine than IQ tests".

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