LeBron's school gets an 'F'

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

LeBron James, one of the great moral frauds of sports, has been riding on his reputation as a man of and for the streets for years now.

James has a net worth somewhere around a billion dollars–billion with a ‘B’–but with his carefully cultivated reputation, he has managed to become a symbol of Black empowerment and even a disciple of Malcolm X.

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Now I don’t want to imply I think he is a grifter. He isn’t. He became as wealthy as he is through sheer grit and talent. I can’t judge whether he “deserves” to be a billionaire–nobody “deserves” a billion dollars–he got it fair and square by filling a market niche that rewarded him with it.

But c’mon, LeBron, any fair reading of your social activism shows it to be a total fraud.

One of James’ “philanthropic” projects is a school he helped set up in his hometown. It caters to kids who come from a hard-luck background, and it is designed to take them from poverty and despair to success.

It isn’t a charter school–no self-respecting Leftist could support anything but a government-run school, since nothing says anti-systemic racism like big government–but rather a partnership with the public schools. The school was designed to not only improve the academic achievement of students but also to provide them the social services and support that are supposed to help them thrive.

It’s a total failure. A complete disaster. A mess. It makes things worse for many students, not better.

Liberalism, is there anything it can’t make worse? I have yet to find the example.

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I Promise School, part-funded by LeBron James and his foundation, has come under scrutiny from the state following revelation of alarming test scores.

The Akron, OH. public school, operates in conjunction with the LeBron James Family Foundation, has not had a sole student in its fall eighth-grade cohort pass the state math test since the third grade, per the Akron Beacon Journal.

James’ altruistic venture saw him help the school open in 2018 to serve ‘students who are already falling behind and in danger of falling through the cracks’, according to its website.

While there was data which revealed students from the school had improved year-on-year, some had in fact gone backward since attending I Promise.

According to the Journal, its black students and those with disabilities are testing ‘in the bottom 5%’ in Ohio.

For years James has been getting glowing press due to his efforts to help out poor kids, and yet nobody took the time to actually look at the results.

As usual, it only matters what you say you are doing. Nobody in the MSM gives a damn about whether there are any results. Remember Biden’s electric car rollout with the electric Hummer? Nobody followed up to find out that fewer than 50 were sold in Q2 this year. Only a few hundred have been sold in total.

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In Q2, only 47 electric Hummer vehicles were delivered to customers, which is almost 83 percent less than a year ago (272). The only positive that we see is an increase from just two units in Q1.

The LeBron James school opened to much fanfare and has gotten glowing reviews over the years. It was a new model for how to deal with kids in crisis!

By glowing I mean practically nuclear fusion levels of positive attention. It was a feel-good story of the decade, we were told. If only conservatives would drop the whole school choice/charter school mantra and get on board with this new approach, there would be no school-to-prison pipeline!

“Crushing expectations” was right, but not in the way they meant it. The results themselves were crushing.

Not one kid passed the math tests in 3 years. By random chance, you would expect SOMEBODY to squeak by. This took some effort.

So how deceptive has the propaganda surrounding James’ fraudulent school been?

Well, only one month ago NBC News did a feature on just how wonderful the school has been and how much it has improved the lives and the performance of these kids. The information on how disastrous the results have been was there for all to see, but nobody in the MSM even cared to look.

Something as basic as facts on the ground were irrelevant; only the narrative they wanted to promote was of any concern. Remember: this was ONE MONTH AGO:

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Now I don’t want to imply that NBC intentionally lied about what was going on, since I have no evidence that they did. Perhaps they knew, but I suspect the answer is more basic: they didn’t care a whit about reality.

Were kids doing well? Who knows? Moreover, who really cares? Not NBC. They had a narrative and were going to promote it, so why even check on facts?

The media is all about narrative. Truth or falsity are irrelevant to them.

They simply do not care. At all.

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Beege Welborn 5:00 PM | December 24, 2024
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