As is their right.

Diversity is fine if that’s what a population wants. It’s wrong for a government to fire the people and replace them with another people more to the government’s liking. And diversity is not a good thing as practiced currently in the USA. We are importing crime and third world diseases then refusing to control either when they arrive. It’s a problem for educational policy and it’s a problem with maintaining quality of life in the cities.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/diversity-is-strength-but-what-about-finland

They can show you nothing about educating blacks.

Try Texas, or some other such diversified US state that isn’t interested in Pacification.

From my own reading about Finland of the past several months, I can say this one thing for sure – Finland is a lot more serious and rigorous about teacher training than America. There is no Teach for Finland program to fast-tract teachers into the classroom. Instead, all Finnish teachers are university trained and earn an MA before they are offered job. Finnish teacher-training programs are also very difficult to get into. Only about one in ten applicants are accepted.

PS: Fear not, Nontclair. My wife is on this trip with me and neither of us are “liberal” enough to stray. We paid for her trip from our own pockets and won grants from several non-profit foundations to pay my way.

To Nextset: I agree with you that the fair-skinned people of Finland missed out on the sustained history of moral depravity that white folks in the US perpetrated but I refuse to lose hope in the possibility for effective moral education of white people in Oakland. Perhaps the good people of Finland have something to teach us there as well.

http://www.businessinsider.com/catholic-high-school-graduate-earnings-2012-10

Duh….

I remember when working in Downtown Oakland as a teen my employer only hiring blacks from the Catholic Schools – saying they were the only ones that worked out…

I would argue the discipline as well as the attention to English and writing/penmanship skills created the dramatic differences between the candidate pools for the entry level white collar jobs.

These conditions could be replicated in a black public school if OUSD cared to do so. Of course, the chillun might not like it. So OUSD won’t. It’s all about making the chillun happy and feeling good about how wonderful they are, not about getting them ready for the Brave New World.

Back to the thread – this Finland trip is as usual only about finding new ways to make the chillun here happy and to boost their already overinflated “self esteem”. A good school would knock that down to the floor and build the students up to a realistic level.

So I’d suggest we look to Texas for ideas not Finland.

City councils should be run by town fathers serving at $100/month, not be full time jobs with benefits.

Including Los Angeles.

School Boards also.

It will be interesting what happens when the money train to Sacramento is shut off.

These teachers are out of the classroom in their failing schools whils substitutes teach the OUSD kids. If he had said, “we are traveling to Piedmont to see how a successful school system works” there would have been a firestorm of controversy.

Are you telling me that an OUSD principal approved this “bridge to nowhere” trip and authorized the disrtrict to pay for a sub? My theory is that the principal at Skyline doesn’t know where Finland is…

let’s make this a math lesson too- how much does this cost the district in sub costs? who gets the frequent flyer miles? let’s plan the next trip- recruiting students from China to come to OUSD- oh wait, the Peralta Diatrict already did that. Thailand? Mali?