The New York State Board of Regents announced it would dump the Academic Literacy Skills Test, a test designed to test teachers on reading ability, because too many minority teachers were failing it. Does that mean the test was racist? Not quite. But it does explain why New York would rather have a black teacher who failed the test than a white teacher who passed it. And why Rachel Maddow should be mad about it. Plus, a new sponsor of the show, Blinds, is here to help you pick the perfect blinds for your windows! Thanks to Blindes for sponsoring The Ben Shapiro Show! Ben Shapiro is a writer and host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and other media outlets. His work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR and NPR. He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, and is the author of the book Race and Literacy: The Truth About It . and he is the host of on the radio show which you can catch on Comedy Central, Comedy Central and HBO. Comedy Central. His music is also available on the Electric Light Orchestra, and his music video is available on SoundCloud, and he's on YouTube. You can catch him on Netflix and other streaming platforms, including his new album, . in the new and improved versions of his new book, I Amused to Death. which is out now. , which you should check out on Amazon Prime and Vimeo, and on iTunes. and on Podchaser so you can get 20% off your credit card, too! If you like what you're listening to, you can be sure to check out Ben Shapiro's work on the Ben Shapiro show, Ben Shapiro s podcast on Instapod, too? if you like it out on Insta? and other links are mentioned in the show? Ben s Insta: Ben's bio on Instagaming is , and you're not going to want to miss it! and Ben s bio is also on Instafeed, too much, too good, and you can find Ben s work on Instacode? , and you re gonna like it on the Insta is , right and more like that, right or you can go to the Instafie account? so let me know what you think about it?
00:00:00.000On Monday, the New York Board of Regents announced it would dump the academic literacy skills test.
00:00:05.000They didn't dump the test, which was designed to test teachers on reading ability in order to raise standards, because there's anything wrong with the test, per se.
00:00:11.000They dumped it because too many minority teachers were failing it.
00:00:14.000One of the members of the task force that looked at the teacher certification test, Professor Leslie Sudak of Pace University, said, quote, having a white workforce really doesn't match our student body anymore.
00:00:24.000It turns out that according to ABC News, 54% of Hispanics and 59% of blacks who took the test failed it on the first try, as opposed to 36% of whites.
00:00:35.000A federal judge in New York, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, ruled the test was fine.
00:00:40.000That wasn't enough, though, for the state of New York, where it's more important that your teacher is black than that your teacher can read and understand material.
00:00:47.000Sudeik's comments were echoed by National Council on Teacher Quality President Kate Walsh, who summarily dismissed test results, quote, There's not a test in the country that doesn't have a disproportionate performance on the part of blacks and Latinos.
00:00:57.000But she acknowledged that getting rid of the test would be a step in the wrong direction.
00:01:03.000There's this weird notion on the left that students learn better from teachers of equal quality so long as the teacher shares a race with those students.
00:01:10.000A good deal of research finds weak or no evidence to substantiate that claim, and that's assuming the teachers are of equal quality.
00:01:15.000There is no evidence, none, zippo zilch, that an inferior teacher of the same race is better for a student than a superior teacher of a different race, yet it's that latter hypothesis New York wants to now pursue.
00:01:27.000So, New York State now wants to sublimate the interests of its students to the interests of political correctness.
00:01:32.000Better for a black kid to have a black teacher who failed the ALST than to have a white teacher who passed it.
00:01:37.000Statistically, of course, this means a higher likelihood the black kid will have an underqualified teacher than a white kid, since we're now attempting to race-sort rather than to hire meritorious teachers.
00:01:46.000That creates new intergenerational pathologies of failed education, for which, presumably, the left will blame white racism and test discrimination without evidence.
00:02:32.000You got old blinds, you got those crappy old kind of plastic blinds that your grandmother put up years ago and you want to get rid of those and replace those with something nice that doesn't look like something out of the set of the wire and so you go out and you go to blinds.com and instead of going to like Bed Bath & Beyond or any of these other stores and trying to purchase really really expensive blinds then you have to put them up yourself and they're not properly tailored to the specifications of your windows blinds.com makes it super easy for you
00:02:58.000If you're not sure what you want or even where to start, you get a free online design consultation.
00:03:02.000Then, you can go on their website and you can specify.
00:03:05.000You measure your window and then you specify what the window size is and what kind of blinds you want, and they cut it to specifications.
00:03:11.000They send back custom recommendations from a professional for what will work with your color scheme and your furniture in specific rooms.
00:03:17.000So if you're a dude and you have no idea what exactly the blinds should look like in your house, they have somebody who definitely will.
00:03:22.000And then they send you free samples to make sure that everything looks the same as it does online.
00:04:10.000There are some rules and restrictions, but it's blinds.com promo code Ben, and you make sure that you use that promo code Ben so you get the 20% off your entire order, which is an awesome deal.
00:04:18.000Plus you let them know that we're the ones who sent you.
00:04:20.000Okay, so, Rachel Maddow has herself an evening last night.
00:08:27.000You know what Comcast, which owns NBC, you know what their effective average tax rate has been from 2008 to 2012?
00:08:33.000In other words, Donald Trump, in this one year of tax returns that they have, paid more as a percentage of his income than any of the people that I just mentioned.
00:08:42.000But they've been saying for years that he paid none, like zero taxes, none.
00:10:03.000This is one of the more embarrassing moments in TV history, and Rachel Maddow topped it, because at least it was Geraldo doing something ridiculous about Al Capone's vault from, like, 50, 60 years before.
00:10:14.000Rachel Maddow is doing something about the most sought-after document in modern presidential history, Donald Trump's tax returns, and she comes up absolutely empty.
00:10:22.000Even the left doesn't know exactly why this is happening to them.
00:10:26.000Even the left is looking at this going, what in the world?
00:10:30.000No, Don Lemon said, how is this not good for Trump?
00:10:35.000How is this not good for Donald Trump?
00:10:37.000Oh, I think it may be good for Donald Trump.
00:10:38.000I mean, one of the things that's very strange about this is Donald Trump probably would benefit from releasing his tax returns with a lot of people.
00:10:46.000This is David K. Johnson, the guy who's speaking right there.
00:10:48.000David K. Johnson is the guy who apparently anonymously received the tax returns in his mail.
00:10:55.000Now, do I believe that Trump leaked his own tax returns?
00:10:58.000No, I don't believe Trump leaked his own tax returns, because if he wanted to do that, he could have done that a long time ago.
00:11:03.000It wouldn't have hurt him at all for him to do it.
00:11:29.000Because the fact is that we still don't have Trump's tax returns from any time in the last 10 years.
00:11:35.000We still don't know why exactly he won't release them, and it seems to me that the same logic that people had with regard to Obama's birth certificate should certainly apply to Trump, right?
00:11:43.000All the people who said that Obama was actually born in Kenya, the reason he's not revealing his birth certificate is because he's actually born in Kenya, and then Obama reveals his birth certificate and he's, of course, not born in Kenya.
00:11:53.000Those same people, they're not calling for Trump's tax returns, but you would imagine that by the same logic they should be saying there's something nefarious in there that Trump doesn't want you to see.
00:12:01.000Now, it's very possible that Trump is just trolling people the same way Obama did.
00:12:04.000Obama trolled people for years on his birth certificate.
00:12:06.000It's possible that Trump is trolling people for years on his tax returns, and eventually he releases them and there's nothing in them.
00:12:11.000It's also possible that it shows that he's not worth $10 billion, he's worth like $2 billion.
00:12:15.000And Trump is such an egomaniac that it's quite possible that he thinks that this would somehow sink him in the public estimation.
00:12:21.000Like, we're all out here sitting around going, well, you know, now we know he's a liar.
00:12:28.000Again, that's that's really silly if that's why he's doing it.
00:12:31.000But you know, we still haven't answered why he hasn't released the tax returns.
00:12:34.000But it just demonstrate the media's desire for a silver bullet for Trump is so high.
00:12:39.000This is why people were sitting on this last night.
00:12:41.000This is why for the first time anyone watched Rachel Maddow's crappy show was because they were hoping they'd tune in and suddenly she'd reveal
00:12:48.000Hundreds of pages of tax returns and somewhere buried deep in there would be Donald Trump trying to take a deduction for child sex slavery or something.
00:12:56.000There'd be a silver bullet buried somewhere in there to destroy Donald Trump.
00:13:24.000That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction on an income of more than $150 million, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally published return just proves that.
00:13:40.000You can also tell it's a Trump statement because of the run-on sentences.
00:13:56.000I don't see anything wrong with Trump's statement.
00:13:57.000It is not illegal, by the way, for Rachel Maddow to put this on the air so long as she didn't actually steal the documents or illegally obtain the documents.
00:14:04.000If somebody just handed them to her like an informant handed them to her and she went with them, then she didn't do anything particularly illegal.
00:14:10.000Again, Trump could not have planned this better.
00:14:14.000If Trump didn't have anything to do with this, he should have, because it's just incredible.
00:14:18.000She humiliated herself on national television in a major way, demonstrating once and for all that all the media want from all of this is just to destroy Trump.
00:14:27.000We'll pause it for a second and say thank you to our friends over at the United States Concealed Carry Association.
00:14:32.000So, if you're somebody who needs firearms education or training,
00:15:50.000Last night, kind of assuming that this was going to be a big disaster for Trump, he went out there and he did a show and he said that NBC was waging a corporate jihad against Trump.
00:16:01.000They are breaking laws all in an effort to undermine and delegitimize the newly elected president.
00:16:08.000NBC News in particular is on a political jihad against the president and his administration.
00:16:14.000Okay, now I can say that Rachel Maddow is awful at her job.
00:16:18.000I can say that MSNBC obviously has a political bias and that most of journalism is now perpetuated against Donald Trump.
00:16:25.000When he says NBC is waging a corporate jihad against Trump, I don't like words like jihad because the idea that it's like some sort of holy war equivalent to, you know, the people who are actually murdering people all over the world, I think is really silly and I think it's over the top.
00:16:37.000But you can see why the right thinks this about the left.
00:16:40.000You can see why The Right looks at what happened on Maddow last night and we say, guys, you are out of your damn minds.
00:16:45.000If you think that this is how you're going to bring down the president, you must be totally crazy.
00:16:49.000I thought the most ironic thing, though, was last night there was a Hillary spokesman named Brian Fallon.
00:16:54.000And if you recall, Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump paid nothing in taxes during the campaign.
00:16:59.000She said the reason he won't reveal his tax returns is because he paid nothing in taxes.
00:17:08.000And I think there may be a couple of reasons.
00:17:11.000First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is.
00:17:14.000Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be.
00:17:19.000Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks.
00:17:32.000Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight,
00:17:37.000To know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody... I'm right there because obviously that's not true.
00:17:44.000Now her spokesman comes forward and says, pay no attention to those tax returns showing that he actually paid $38 million in taxes.
00:17:51.000We should instead return focus to Trumpcare tomorrow and the millions it will leave uninsured.
00:18:15.000But for the moment, let's just enjoy the spectacle of Rachel Maddow making a huge deal out of the fact that Donald Trump is very rich and pays lots of taxes because it's quite spectacular.
00:18:23.000We're going to talk a little bit more about Trumpcare and the confusion therein.
00:18:54.000So okay, so the annual subscribers today, we have a new deal for you annual subscribers.
00:18:58.000The number one Amazon best-selling book, a masterwork of thoroughness, a comprehensive investigation into leftist ideology, our own Michael J. Knowles, BA, Yale University.
00:19:11.000His book, his number one best-selling book, Reasons to Vote Democrat, yes, it's 260 pages of blank paper, and yes, it does have a quote from me on the front that says, thorough.
00:19:19.000You can get that for free right now when you're an annual subscriber.
00:19:23.000You get it signed by our own Michael J. Knowles, and he is just eager to sign them for you.
00:19:27.000In fact, as I showed you the other day, he signs copies to himself.
00:19:30.000He inscribes copies of his own book to himself because that's who Michael J. Knowles is.
00:19:34.000But you can get a copy of that for free, a signed copy for free, when you become an annual subscriber.