Jay supports $300 M scholarships for Penn teens, critics say he's feeling like a Black Republican

[Harry B]

Education reform and uplifting kids in tough circumstances has literally been the focus of my entire career. Every day of my life I am more seriously engaged in school reform and education for youth than Jay-Z has been in any day of his.



These are Jay-Z's actual partners in this initiative. Do you trust them to be doing the right thing for Black kids? Do you trust them to be doing ANYTHING that would put Black kids on an equal footing with White kids?

Billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania (net worth $27.6 billion) is the main person behind this push. He's a professional gambler-turned stock trader who now focuses on politics. A recent ProPublica report found that he has dodged over a billion dollars in taxes via legally dubious means. As a Libertarian, he has dumped tens of millions of dollars into lobbying for "school choice" initiatives that will direct public taxpayer money into private schools.

Besides school choice, Yass has donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Israel and anti-Muslim groups. He has been focused recently on propping up Donald Trump, helping push a huge influx of money into Truth Social and meeting with Trump regarding his plans for TikTok. There is strong buzz that Yass could become the Trump's Treasury Secretary if Trump wins the presidency.

Nathan Benefield, senior vice-president of Commonwealth Partners (a conservative business leaders lobbying group) has been their face pushing the bill. They're a libertarian group whose stated goal is to push "small government" and "market based" ideas into public policy. Their answer to literally every public policy issue is to privatize it.

Judy Ward, one of the sponsors who introduced the bill, is a Republican leader in the Senate known for having one of the most consistently conservative voting records in Pennsylvania. She is endorsed by the NRA Political Victory Fund, the American Conservative Union, and Commonwealth Partners (a conservative business organization).

Ward happens to be the state senator who gave a random third party conservative group access to some of Pennsylvania's voting machines in order to "audit" them after Trump claimed the election was stolen. This forced the state to decertify those machines for further use as they may have been compromised.



Two right-wing libertarians allied with Trump and a hardcore conservative Republican. Do y'all seriously believe that the goal of these three people is to ensure that Black child get an equal education and can attend the same schools as White folk? Or do you believe that they don't know what's going on and Jay-Z, with 1/100th as much time on the issue, is playing 4-dimensional chess and pulling the wool over their eyes.

Perhaps trying something different, that doesn't affect anything else, would be good.
The bill might've been sponsored by republicans but the final bill was passed by a bi-partisan majority, obviously it makes sense that democrats wouldn't** off the rip initiate anything that might benefit private schools outta itemized tax funds (which the initial bill wanted). Instead they a lot of these other typical republican things stripped.

Just sitting on your hands and milking the system for money by doing the same old shyt that obviously isn't working, should be considered fraud.

But obviously, the people at Roc Nation (I seriously doubt that it is Jay-z himself) should be wary of the people they move with and understand the complexities of such bills.


But thanks for the breakdown of the people.


And obviously, music pages and such should not be reporting on these complex things. Cause they are making it sound like Roc Nation is donating money or doing something like that.

 

[Wargames]

This is typical Jay-Z. Get paid to be the face of black exploitation by rich wealthy white people.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The” Charters segregate struggling kids “ argument makes no sense because public school systems have always done that,especially at the high school level .Around here there are two public high schools that are about business ..The “problem” is they don’t let a lot of kids in and if you’re not picked you’re relegated to your local high school full of nikkas that flat out don’t give a fukk…

When public school systems do that, they basically guarantee worse results than if they didn't. Moving all the gifted students to a single school shows only very minor improvements for the gifted students at best (in many cases none at all or even drops in performance), while leading to massive drops in performance for the low-performing kids left behind. So it's always been a bad policy.

But it's false to suggest that charters don't contribute to the problem. I'll give two examples from school districts I have personal connections to.



My first example is a small town in the South where the schools were fully segregated until the 1960s. When the federal government finally forced them to desegregate, the white students and their parents harassed and attacked the black kids who came to the school and any white kids who associated with them, and then the very next year they opened up an all-white private school. To this day, that school is 98% white and 2% "other", and all the white kids with money go there.

As white people left the area due to white flight, the county eventually became majority black, as did the schoolboard as a result. The black schoolboard members resisted charter schools for a long time because they knew it would steal resources from the public school. But one year a shady move by some white politicians led to gerrymandering which enabled a white schoolboard majority for the first time in decades. That white majority immediately approved a new system of charter schools, which they claimed would be open to all students. However, they (and the previous black schoolboard members) full well knew that White people would be the ones getting the majority of the slots. At this point, that charter schools are about 70% white and 15% black (rest "other"), while the public schools are 5% white and 85% black. Now not only the rich white kids get to stay away from black kids, but nearly all the working-class and middle-class ones do. How much educational and community support do you think the

So the ridiculous segregation you had due to the private school has now only INCREASED due to charter schools. Now, whenever you have a talented teacher working in the town, do you think they end up at the public school or at the charter school?




My other example is from a non-Southern predominantly black city that didn't have tracked schooling until charters entered the picture. The school district didn't approve any charter schools itself, but other districts nearby instituted them and numerous parents were able to apply and get their kids into charters. This resulted in a serious enrollment drop at the public school district, causing it to lose funding and lay off teachers. In response to the crisis, the district started an "honors" school for the first time which students had to test into. The honors school isn't much better than the other schools except that all the high-performing kids are pulled in together. So now the remaining schools are suffering from the loss of charter students AND the loss of honors students.

How do you think all those left behind kids are going t ofare now that all the highly-motivated kids and positive role models have left?



This is what happens time and time again. Rather than looking at the root causes of the problems, we're actually exacerbating the issue by doubling down on the same thing that caused the problem in the first place.

 

[010101]

still looking for a savior¿*

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The bill might've been sponsored by republicans but the final bill was passed by a bi-partisan majority

Because hardly anyone advocates for the parents and kids who are getting fukked over the most. Many democrats represent rich white people who aren't interested in integration either - Joe Biden once WAS one of those people. The parents and kids who are hurt most have no power, don't donate politically, aren't politically active, and don't even know how to advocate for themselves.

So people like Yass and Benefield spend tens of millions of dollars pushing propaganda about their initiative, they move public opinion over to their side (especially among well-off white people, regardless of party), and not only all the Republicans but also some of the Dems support it because their constituents are brainwashed by all the propaganda and/or are relatively well-off people who don't care if everyone else gets burnt.


In my experience, the people who actually care about poor black kids, the ones who work seriously in education and reducing achievement gaps, are dominantly opposed to vouchers.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Honestly I don't think the Prussian System of education works for all schools. There's different styles of learning, specialization, etc so I'm all for more Black children having the opportunity in charter schools

There are vast reforms that need to be made in the outdated Prussian system, but further segregation of kids ensures those reforms are less likely, not more likely.

The books I linked earlier point out how the more segregated a school gets, the more forced they are into idiotic regressive forms of education. Standardized test after standardized test. Classes focused entirely on rote learning, repeating after the teacher, everyone stays in their seats staring ahead all day with extreme punishments for kids who step out of line. Art and music courses are cancelled, kids who are failing lose all their electives which are just replaced with more rote reading and rote math classes. Then we act surprised that kids hate school and act out with such a regressive approach.

All the interesting, liberalized reforms are taking place in the rich white schools, because they have parents with the time to learn and attract teachers with the skills to implement. The inner-city public schools with their declining enrollments and high teacher turnover can't implement anything for shyt because they're constantly under pressure from all sides.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The biggest issue with public schools isn’t funding. It’s kids acting an ass, social media & bad parenting.

The biggest issue at my school was the distractions from the students. A lot of kids just didn't give a fukk. Their parents didn't give a fukk.

I know for a fact we were better funded than some random school in China, but the difference is just cultural. One culture cares about school, the other doesn't.

Fair question. There are systematic problems in education. However, the biggest difference is priorities and which funding cannot fix. Around the world, you see kids going to school for a purpose and their parents also pushing their studies. In America, school is a place many parents drop their kids off for eight hours a day. Within a given zip you can easily identify parent involvement in passing and failing schools.

Y'all are describing the effects, not the causes. Students and parents don't care in those schools BECAUSE they've been cut off from quality education for generations.

China wasn't always known as this "superior culture" that some of y'all make it out to be. In the 1800s, Chinese immigrants in the USA were stereotyped as dirty, uneducated, ignorant, criminally-minded, and primarily working in physical labor, prostitution, and drug dens. Even through the first half of the 1900s, the state of Chinese education in China itself was crap.

Education in China was turned around by the Communist Party, which undertook a massive initiative in the 1960s and 1970s to reach for universal education. In just 30 years, they went from one of the lowest-literacy major countries to one of the highest. Their test scores went through the roof. This was entirely due to a strict policy of high-quality universal public education for every child.

Finland, similarly, was one of the poorest countries in western Europe after World War II. In the 1970s, socialist-minded government began a program of universal education rooted in the policy that every student must attend their neighborhood schools (no selection, no cherry-picking, no private education) and every neighborhood school must provide its students with a high-quality education. By the 1990s, Finland was making a name for itself with the highest PISA scores in the world (the most highly respected international academic testing to compare nations). They did it not by isolating the highest performers, but by integrating them and ensuring opportunity for everyone.


There was nothing special about Chinese culture or Finnish culture, despite the attempts to claim so after the fact. What they had was political leaders with the vision and energy to choose equality and universal education.


America has had the exact opposite. Where does the "culture" come from to care about school? Where do you earn to be a good parent? Where do educational values develop? There are only three choices. They can come from

1) your own family's personal history with education;
2) a strong government initiative; or
3) the influence of the people and institutions around you.

If your family has never had the chance to get educated, if the government isn't prioritizing education in your community, and if everyone around you comes from that same background because you were segregated off, THEN WHAT THE fukk DO YOU EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE LIKE??? Of course they're not going to care about education, everything in their background has conditioned them to exactly that. If they don't have the personal family background to care due to slavery, enforced segregation, and de facto segregation, the we have to make it happen via government policy and integration. There's no other option.

Black kids and parents don’t take education seriously for shyt…yall wonder why everyone wants to distance their kids from yours? For the few gifted black kids with strong parent support, they deserve schools with kids like them

The kids that don’t seem to want to show potential for general education should be diverted to a trade-based school: mechanic, HVAC, Plumbing, etc. The remaining kids that will likely be dead before 24 or generally won’t be about shyt anyway can be eliminated.

You're literally describing the status quo that already led to the current situation. A few Black kids with support structures are able to get out and enjoy school with the "good kids", a few of the remainder are lucky to get labor jobs, and the rest are fukked. Then the cycle repeats itself every generation.

If that's your goal, you should be happy that America already has the ideal education system for those exact outcomes.

 

[valet]

Aa far as the gifted school vs. mixing them with regular kids. I've worked at a school where you had to test in but also allowed kids who stayed in the school radius to come. The kids were in the same classes except honors and ap classes. The gifted kids can influence the neighborhood kids in some ways. But learning environment wise it can be challenge. Particularly with the violence.

Now the school is slowly turning all testing. With the exception of special ed kids and also autistic kids. (Some autistic kids are in a regular classes and are gifted). But the biggest change I've seen is gifted kids come to school on a regular basis. And they have some of the same challenges as neighborhood kids. But their responses to challenges, traumas doesn't affect their succeeding in school.

 

[Htrb-nvr-blk-&-ug-as-evr]

Y'all are describing the effects, not the causes. Students and parents don't care in those schools BECAUSE they've been cut off from quality education for generations.

China wasn't always known as this "superior culture" that some of y'all make it out to be. In the 1800s, Chinese immigrants in the USA were stereotyped as dirty, uneducated, ignorant, criminally-minded, and primarily working in physical labor, prostitution, and drug dens. Even through the first half of the 1900s, the state of Chinese education in China itself was crap.

Education in China was turned around by the Communist Party, which undertook a massive initiative in the 1960s and 1970s to reach for universal education. In just 30 years, they went from one of the lowest-literacy major countries to one of the highest. Their test scores went through the roof. This was entirely due to a strict policy of high-quality universal public education for every child.

Finland, similarly, was one of the poorest countries in western Europe after World War II. In the 1970s, socialist-minded government began a program of universal education rooted in the policy that every student must attend their neighborhood schools (no selection, no cherry-picking, no private education) and every neighborhood school must provide its students with a high-quality education. By the 1990s, Finland was making a name for itself with the highest PISA scores in the world (the most highly respected international academic testing to compare nations). They did it not by isolating the highest performers, but by integrating them and ensuring opportunity for everyone.


There was nothing special about Chinese culture or Finnish culture, despite the attempts to claim so after the fact. What they had was political leaders with the vision and energy to choose equality and universal education.


America has had the exact opposite. Where does the "culture" come from to care about school? Where do you earn to be a good parent? Where do educational values develop? There are only three choices. They can come from

1) your own family's personal history with education;
2) a strong government initiative; or
3) the influence of the people and institutions around you.

If your family has never had the chance to get educated, if the government isn't prioritizing education in your community, and if everyone around you comes from that same background because you were segregated off, THEN WHAT THE fukk DO YOU EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE LIKE??? Of course they're not going to care about education, everything in their background has conditioned them to exactly that. If they don't have the personal family background to care due to slavery, enforced segregation, and de facto segregation, the we have to make it happen via government policy and integration. There's no other option.







You're literally describing the status quo that already led to the current situation. A few Black kids with support structures are able to get out and enjoy school with the "good kids", a few of the remainder are lucky to get labor jobs, and the rest are fukked. Then the cycle repeats itself every generation.

If that's your goal, you should be happy that America already has the ideal education system for those exact outcomes.

Problem is there are entirely too few Black kids with good support structure. Those few gifted students that are afraid to show their potential due to peer pressure or environment are lumped in with the ain’t shyt kids and left to rot with them in the current system. They all get sent to the same failing public school system to become failures. I guarantee you out of every 10 poor black kids there are at least 4 or 5 with an extraordinary talent of some kind. Be it art, math, or just a mechanical mastermind. My idea is to find that talent, cull them out early and put them on a path to success. Kinda like the girls that found a new way to solve the Pythagorean theorem….there are a LOT of black geniuses out there to be harvested but many feel hopeless due to circumstances or are too influenced by peers that don’t want them to succeed. I agree with you, it’s the environment that the kids grow up in that affects their performance the most. Maybe set up boarding schools so the less fortunate won’t have to worry about the next meal or where they will be sleeping that night. I know it’s deeper that what i said, but in the end it boils down to you can’t save them all…gotta cull the best and hope future parents and kids will see the success and strive for it.

 

[HoopLife]

After what Jay Z did in Brooklyn with the Barclays Center, I don't know how anyone can trust him.

Despite presenting the Barclays Center as something to benefit Brooklyn, Jay-Z’s posturing as the face of the project is a strictly selfish stance. The Center hasn’t produced any sort of career options for kids in the area (let alone the Marcy Projects), unless you count being given the chance to take fast-food orders as creating opportunities for the better of the community. The scale of the stadium is too large to do anything to aid and foster the borough’s music scene. Long-time local businesses are also faced with a prohibitive rent hike next time their leases come up. For the Barclays Center to become a valued part of the community (and a part of Brooklyn’s appeal) it has to integrate into the community. How about offering high-school kids in the borough an expedited chance to become part of the Nets’ marketing team? Instead, the stadium’s scale and corporate glow casts it as a reminder that Jay-Z may like to endlessly brag about his ties to Brooklyn, but these days he’s more interested in how pimpin’ out the allure of the borough can increase his bottom line.

Point: Jay-Z Sold Out Brooklyn - The Village Voice

Counterpoint: Jay-Z Saved Brooklyn According to Jay-Z’s own mythology, at some point in the ’90s he used an apartment at 560 State Street in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood as a stash spot for his drug-peddling paraphernalia. Last week, the rapper played eight back-to-back shows two and a...

www.villagevoice.com

Jay’s seemingly minimal understanding of gentrification is not entirely wrong. Gentrification is, in fact, a structural and cultural phenomenon that specifically and disproportionately targets low-income Black communities. However, it is in no way a “genius” plan and the solution to it is not for rich Black people to push out poor Black folks—the very meaning of gentrification. Therein is the issue.

Notwithstanding these truths, what Jay-Z is repeatedly demanding of Black people, be it intentional or not, is for us to find comfort in being pushed out of our homes by rich people as long as they are Black. What many of us in Atlanta know, however, is that being displaced by other Black people—in our case, politicians—makes you no less homeless or jobless than being displaced by white people. Further, while the intention may be for Black folks to invest in homes for other Black people, because investment from rich people is never centered around the community in which they’re investing, it will always give way to affluent white people finding their way into our communities; this to say that whether it is via respectability, other facets of white supremacy, or the occupation of Black spaces by literal white bodies, gentrification can never benefit low-income Black communities.

GENTRIFICATION: RICH BLACK PEOPLE PUSHING OUT POOR BLACK FOLKS WON’T SOLVE ANYTHING - Da'Shaun L. Harrison

April 26 was the reopening of New York’s Webster Hall. It was also the night that rapper and businessman Jay-Z would […]

dashaunharrison.com

 

[R.E.N. Spells Ren]

Brehs really arguing adamantly against scholarships?

This is for private schools, not charters. My niece, in another northeast city, got a scholarship to a private school from 6th grade onward that has $50k+ yearly tuition. It has been an immensely rewarding blessing for her life.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Brehs really arguing adamantly against scholarships?

This is for private schools, not charters.

Brehs really believing that the most far-right rich white people in the country suddenly have their best interests at heart because they frame it as "scholarships"?


You have to get yourself educated on what is actually going on:

'This Ain't It': Pennsylvanians Slam Jay-Z's Roc Nation for School Voucher Push | Common Dreams

"An out-of-state billionaire is pairing with a suburban Philadelphia one to try to destroy public education," said one critic.

www.commondreams.org

Pennsylvania has one of the most unequal school funding systems in the nation. Democrats in the state have been trying to pass a $5.1 billion bill to radically equalize education funding. Republicans (with some Dem support) are instead spearheading a bill to take $300 million in taxpayer money and move it from poor urban schools to private schools. Literally the exact opposite of equal funding. The window-dressing is to frame it as "scholarships", which will help a select few kids, but the long-term purpose and major impact will be to screw over the 99% of kids who remain in those public schools by decreasing their funding. These same people backing the bill are doing it with the long-term goal of destroying public education altogether.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Problem is there are entirely too few Black kids with good support structure. Those few gifted students that are afraid to show their potential due to peer pressure or environment are lumped in with the ain’t shyt kids and left to rot with them in the current system. They all get sent to the same failing public school system to become failures. I guarantee you out of every 10 poor black kids there are at least 4 or 5 with an extraordinary talent of some kind. Be it art, math, or just a mechanical mastermind. My idea is to find that talent, cull them out early and put them on a path to success. Kinda like the girls that found a new way to solve the Pythagorean theorem….there are a LOT of black geniuses out there to be harvested but many feel hopeless due to circumstances or are too influenced by peers that don’t want them to succeed. I agree with you, it’s the environment that the kids grow up in that affects their performance the most. Maybe set up boarding schools so the less fortunate won’t have to worry about the next meal or where they will be sleeping that night. I know it’s deeper that what i said, but in the end it boils down to you can’t save them all…gotta cull the best and hope future parents and kids will see the success and strive for it.

I understand what your idea is, the issue that it's literally never worked anywhere. Just "cull out the best and fukk the rest" has never worked anywhere. The reasons why have already been explained in detail in this thread - your plan ENSURES there will never, ever be any incentive to improve education for the 95% of kids left behind in the Black community. Unless your long-term goal is a white community that can brag about their 1% black genetics and a black community that is absolutely and completely screwed, what do you actually think your plan will achieve?

 

[Formerly Black Trash]

I understand what your idea is, the issue that it's literally never worked anywhere. Just "cull out the best and fukk the rest" has never worked anywhere. The reasons why have already been explained in detail in this thread - your plan ENSURES there will never, ever be any incentive to improve education for the 95% of kids left behind in the Black community. Unless your long-term goal is a white community that can brag about their 1% black genetics and a black community that is absolutely and completely screwed, what do you actually think your plan will achieve?

These the same dudes that hate on Black women who got bread that say there aren't any available Black men and date white men

They don't have a problem with looking out for self and not caring about the community, they just hate hypergamy when it's Black women

(I think it's bad when men or women do it)

 

[MoshpitMazi]

Not fukking with this from Jay, he's my favorite rapper of all time but so tone deaf when it comes to money.

But then again why are we expecting a billionaire capitalist to not be a clown?