Periodically I will see stories like this come across my timeline of some non-White high school graduate that is accepted to a slew of colleges. They are usually on the “local” news but generally are stories from somewhere else in the country.
Channel 13 was one of the stations we got to choose from when I was growing up. In the Toledo market we had 11 (CBS), 13 (NBC) and 24 (ABC) plus channel 30 which was PBS. That was it until we got cable when I was maybe in middle school and that is one reason I read a lot as a kid. Those station affiliations have since changed. WTVG has gone through a ton of ownership changes that I didn’t even know about but is currently owned by “Gray Media” that owns a total of 180 local TV stations in 113 markets across the country.
Anyway, back to our young scholar:
A Chicago-area 18-year-old has a lot to be proud of.
He graduated high school with acceptance letters to dozens of colleges and millions of dollars in scholarships.
It’s a payoff for many years of hard work.
Aaron Williams and his mother, Ericka Smith, have sifted through a stack of college acceptance letters.
The 18-year-old was accepted to 83 colleges and counting…..
…..The Bogan High School graduate is a straight-A student and had a bold proclamation on his first day of class as a freshman.
“Came in to the principal and said I would be the class of 2025 valedictorian, and now it’s safe to say that I have done that,” Williams said.
Williams did become the valedictorian of his class.
Wow, impressive right? Well….
I don’t mean to take anything away from this kid, I am sure he worked hard but are his accomplishments noteworthy enough to warrant being covered in the Toledo local news as he is a kid from Chicago?
According to the story above, he is a graduate of a Chicago area school called Bogan High School. The full name of the school is “William J. Bogan Computer Technical High School” and according to Great Schools it is not a very great school.
The school is located at 3939 West 79th Street in Chicago on the southwest side of Chicongo in the Ashburn neighborhood. I don’t what that really means as I know very little about Chicongo other than I don’t want to go there.
The student body is about what you would expect…
If he were at a school that was 60% White and 10% Asian, want to bet he wouldn’t be the valedictorian?
The Ashburn area is “only” 42% black but this school is 57% black and the principal is one “Alahrie A. Aziz–Sims”.
I scrolled through her LinkedIn profile where she makes this claim “Data Inspired Leader – Expert Insight, Life Changing Results“, and where she boasts impressive credentials such as a Master of Education degree from the prestigious online school “American College of Education”. Like many public school administrators she put in a couple of years in a classroom before becoming an “area literacy coach” for a year and then moving into a role as an assistant principal and finally a principal. In her 20 years in “education” she spent less than 20% of that time in a classroom.
Here is a comment she made on a post a few years ago:
I love the hokey “Y’all” from Maurice Swinney to try to make him sound genuine or whatever, almost as much as I love the “EdD” in his profile name. Wow, a Doctor of Education degree! Very impressive! According to his LinkedIn it only took him 15 years to attain this honor….
Like his buddy Alahrie A. Aziz–Sims, he spent a whopping one year in actual teaching before moving on to roles as assistant principal and principal before deciding even that was too much like teaching and becoming the Chicago Public School’s “Chief Equity Officer”. Sensing a pattern here?
That’s more than enough mockery, back to Aaron Williams. According to the story, he is going to Northern Illinois University located west of Chicago a bit where he plans to pursue electrical engineering, a fine career path and one that is pretty challenging. NIU is an OK school, U.S. News and World ranked them #273 in National Universities out of a total of 436 putting them close to the bottom third although it is tied for 273rd with a whole slew of other schools including my alma mater Bowling Green State University, a school that was close to my family and my wife’s family and had so many fellow graduates from my high school alma mater that I sometimes felt like I never left high school.
So he accepted admission and received a full ride to Northern Illinois University, by any measure an at best mediocre college. That is something of interest to people in Toledo, Ohio? Put it another way:
If this kid, with whatever grades and test scores, was White it must be asked: would he get this many scholarships and acceptances? Would the media have covered the story if he was White or Asian?
Of course not.
If I had bothered to fill out enough college applications, back when you had to fill those apps out with an actual pen on paper, I could have gotten hundreds of acceptance letters. Thanks to my awesome ACT scores I received brochures from a ton of colleges, mostly small liberal arts schools. I wouldn’t have gotten any scholarships of course. I remember sitting down with the financial aid person at my school and when she asked what my parents did for a living and I replied “my dad is a doctor”, she laughed and moved on to the student loan sections because clearly I wasn’t going to get any need-based scholarships.
I have no idea why this kid would apply at so many schools, especially since he ended up accepting an offer to go to a school that is less than 70 miles from his high school. Since there is no mention of a dad in the story I assume he wants to be reasonably close to his mom which is understandable. It seems to be a black thang so you can brag about how many colleges you were accepted to and I suspect that it doesn’t take that much time to copy and paste information into an online application compared to filling them out by paper.
A black kid with good grades and passable test scores is going to get accepted into any mid-range school in America. There are other really good schools in the Chicago area, Northwestern is one of the best schools in America and even closer to home in Evanston, Illinois. The University of Chicago is a Top 20 school by most accounts and is right in Chicongo. The Illinois Institute of Technology is pretty well regarded and has several electrical engineering options. I assume Northern Illinois won because a) it is pretty inexpensive with an annual tuition of around $13,000 compared to Northwestern at $68,000 and b) it doesn’t have very high standards for admission.
In short, Aaron Williams is an above average black kid who graduated valedictorian from a high school that is a disaster. He was accepted at a lot of schools and was offered a lot of money in scholarships because he is black and he chose a fairly local, very inexpensive school where he can go basically for free for four years and get a degree in electrical engineering. I hope he does well, I really do.
On the other hand, I recall back to a post from January of 2020 titled The Dumbing Down Of America where we looked at a variety of topics but one was Ms. Marqell McClendon, like Aaron Williams the valedictorian of her graduating class, in her case at Cody High School in Detroit. When she arrived at Michigan State University (not exactly an academic powerhouse either) after getting, like Aaron Williams, all A’s in high school she immediately began to struggle even in remedial math. Being the smartest black kid in a school full of low IQ blacks doesn’t really measure your likelihood of success in a college setting. On the other hand, according to a LinkedIn profile for a Marqell McClendon who attended Michigan State starting in 2019 which matches the story, she graduated with a degree in communication and went on to grad school at the University of Michigan in the School of Public Health.
Smart move on her behalf to major in communications as an undergrad as that might be one of the easiest degree programs to skate by in and likely involved very little if any math or sciences. There is a reason “Communications” is so often the “degree program” you see many Division 1 athletes enrolled in. Electrical engineering is a whole different beast, your teachers can push you through communications classes but in electrical engineering I would hope any answer is either right or wrong. One of my roommates my first year of college was majoring in electrical engineering and it looked incredibly difficult.
That brings me at long last, and kudos to you for making it this far, to my point. Why would a local news outlet in Toledo, Ohio run a story about a high school graduate from Chicago that is going to attend Northern Illinois University?
Because he is black and not a complete moron, and that is newsworthy.
Also because the media loves to run stories of blacks showing any amount of success and also finding stories of minor malice by Whites toward blacks to try to provide some minor counterweight to the endless stories of black violent crime. Our local media does this all the time, look at this black girl with a lemonade stand in Atlanta! Look at this White guy who shot a black guy in Topeka, Kansas! Boo for the White people, cheer for the black people.
Again, I wish Aaron Williams only the best. A black guy who becomes an electrical engineer is far less likely to end up in jail being paid for by White tax dollars than a high school drop-out black. It just is very interesting that a minor story like this one gets pushed onto people from these giant media conglomerates that pose as “news” organizations.
As a much younger and more-naive man, I spent a brief time as a science teacher in a racially-mixed high school near Atlanta, GA. To say that it was an eye-opening experience is to understate the thing considerably. Let’s just say that I was lucky to get out of there with my skin, and without being shot or stabbed.
Mediocrities such as this Ms. Sims are a lot more common than you might realize. As a field of higher learning, education as taught in most of our post-secondary institutions is quite frankly a joke. If you have a pulse, you can do reasonably well. Rigor in the sense of the STEM fields is all but non-existent.
Quite naturally, most of the people within these departments – and many of the students who pass through them – are leftists, who have been marinated in the same WOKE/DEI/Cultural Marxist ideology. Ideological conformity is very real, and group-think is rampant. As an actual scientist, I was able to mop the floor with most of my profs, not because I am any great genius, but because of how pathetically weak most of them were as educators and scholars.
It is going to take a very big broom to clean up the mess.
I bet he didn’t apply to that many. They just sent him acceptance letters, unsolicited, because he is a valedictorian negro.
Agreed that this person’s accomplishments (such as they are) would never have made the news if he were White or Asian, but this is actually a good outcome. He’s going to a mediocre at best college. Good. He might succeed there with his probably shitty (not necessarily his own fault) preparation.
What’s really infuriating is when someone like this person goes to a place such as Stanford or Michigan or MIT where they have less chance than I do of success as an NFL linebacker. Not only do they personally fail, but it takes away a slot from someone who might actually do well there.
Finally, a nonfamous/non-competitive college MIGHT give you good training. If nothing else, maybe in part because their students are NOT exceptionally bright or well prepared, so the place has to concentrate on actually doing a good job teaching. I’ve been in and around elite institutions my whole life (including both MIT and Harvard) and the teaching at those places ranges from inspired to utter crap. You go there not for the teaching. You go there for the name to put on your resume, and to make connections. If I’d only understood that when I was in school. 🙄
What is a “ppl”? Is that Groidesian?
There’s a guy with a substack (Fit to Teach) who’s a PE teacher at an inner city NY public high school. It’s illuminating to say the least. Somewhere in his writings he mentioned that some years the valedictorian had a 1000 SAT score. A 1000. the best score in the school
And that’s since they give you an additional 200 points (100 on each) when they “reconfigured it” I think in the mid aughts. So that 1000 today is equal to about 800 when you and I went. I.e. not college worthy.
Of course they went to college (as it’s just a scam too to asset strip even more people)
if a 1000 SAT is the smartest person in the school, we are completely wasting our time and money. (and of course NY spends tons of money on “schooling”)
When my son graduated some 10 years back, they had an awards ceremony. There was some magic negro that apparently had decent grades and played some sports ball. He ended up taking maybe 90% of the scholarships awarded that day. Every different organization got up, made some speech about their particular scholarship opportunity and then announced the winner – magic negro once again. He got several free ride scholarships plus a host of others.
I couldn’t help thinking that many those wouldn’t stack – that is if he accepted scholarship “A”, he wouldn’t be able to accept “B” and “C” but maybe could take “D”. So no matter how he decided, about half those scholarships just wouldn’t pay out. I have no idea if they had a second or third place finisher for that possibility, or whether they organization just kept the money and saved it for next year. But hell, magic negro got to brag about all the free swag he won and a bunch of slightly above average white kids got shafted.
In today’s world, the most powerful person to be is that magic negro, slightly above average intelligence, well behaved, and knows how to talk well. Like, say, Obama.
Yes, indeed, the soft niggotry of low expectations. Enjoy it now, homeboys and -girls, for your star is no longer rising.
My sons graduated from blindingly White Catholic high school in the mid 00s where all the laurels and accolades were reserved for the girls, who stood in for blacks in the utter absence of any student darker than a paper bag. Same soft bigotry, same hollow result, as the guys who took AP calculus and physics got edged out for the top spots at graduation by girls who avoided anything STEM-adjacent like the plague.
Twenty years on now, White women have slipped down the rungs on the victim ladder, finally joining White men at the bottom as oppressors-by-definition. I freely admit to having felt a little schadenfreude for their obvious discomfort with losing victim status, but it is so that no group holds the top spot forever. And that fate will even befall the numinous negro, who is beginning to suffer the fallout from the fatigue which is finally being whispered about in polite circles. I believe that dawg has had its day and blacks have badly overplayed their hand. Look for fewer such stories as this one going forward, as new victims of pale male oppression are identified and deified, while surly blacks sulk about their loss of special status and privilege.
Ya know what’s better than winning a gold medal in the special Olympics? NOT being retarded…
Bet me that his ACT score is below average.
I was accepted at IIT in the late 70’s for electrical engineering but dad couldn’t afford the tuition at the time. And there were few scholarships available. So I went 2 years at our community college while working. Good thing I did as despite good grades, it helped me realize I really didn’t want that as a career. If the current programs are even half as tough there is no way that kid makes it through the first year. And computers were doing BASIC and COBOL back then and were much less complex as was all the tech.
60% of college educated Sheboons work for government.
EDU has been worthless for a long time.
Just as the Long Marchers intended.
Remember when teevee would shut off for a few hours with a test pattern and they played the National Anthem?
Good times before it became a GAE and retarded version of CCCP with DEI mixed in.
Arthur, I grew up 1 mile from Bogan. It was a normal high school then (50’s-60’s). Even in the 70’s it was OK. Back then, a decent ACT got you an Illinois State Scholarship. My ACT was 32 and I got one. I went to IIT for a year. Even then you needed to carry as it was in/close to the hood. It’s the anus of the midwest.