Denise Specht, the state’s top teachers’ union boss, believes “grades, conferences with teachers and even talks with the children themselves” are better judges of how students are doing than test results, writes Stewart. That “terribly irresponsible response” is easier to say for someone who doesn’t “have Black children getting a raw deal in a kind, gentle, racist education system.”Is the American education system--thousands of school districts in 50 states and 6 districts and territories--racist? Is that even possible? How big would that conspiracy have to be? Are all those Democratic activists (teachers, especially teachers union members) really honestly truly racist?
Occam's Razor tells me that there's a different explanation, one that involves the cultural dysfunctionality of certain segments, including racial segments, of our society. Yes, I'm saying that some cultures are "better" than others and some are more likely to allow students to achieve more in school than others do. That didn't used to be such a shocking conclusion.
Here's an example. I teach in a relatively upscale area. In one of my classes, only 1 in 12 students has a step-parent. I'm sure some of those kids are being raised by single parents, but as I scroll through the parent contacts in our student information system I see that a lot of them live with both their parents. Any psych will tell you what an advantage that is. In fact, in the year I was born, Moynihan released his report on "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action". Despite the welfare state, affirmative action, and a focus on racial issues, the problems Moynihan identified decades ago have worsened. I just don't accept that they've worsened because America's teachers have gotten more racist in the last fifty-plus years and are intentionally limiting the achievement of black students.
Some black and Hispanic students do succeed.
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Some minority students DO succeed. And they do so by not making excuses. They work hard, they come in for tutorials, they take challenging course and they behave like the wonderful rational young adults they are. Other minority students fail. They fail to learn the language. They drop out of school or have kids before they are adults. They skip regularly and no parents take responsibility for them. They belong to gangs. None of these issues are ones that the schools can control. All of them are characteristic of societal dysfunction in the family.
Example: My school, in trying to bring up the test scores of one demographic-black males-did everything they could to lure these students to the necessary tutorials. They provided a later bus. They provided snacks, then meals, even prizes. They even changed the entire school schedule to have tutorials in the middle of the school day-disrupting the function of every single teacher, class and club. But to no avail. We have .parents who make excuse for them. We have parents who will move students from school to school to avoid testing. And we have parents falling back on racism.
It used to be that we rewarded merit in this country, We picked the best and the brightest regardless of race, religion, gender or any of the other alphabet soup of victimhood that exist today. It wasn't perfect, but when we said we had the best engineers, the best designers, the best scientists, we meant it. Now with hiring quotas we might have the best, but we only have the best of those specifically limited groups from which we are allowed to choose. That's not the same thing. In imposing quotas, we have succeeded in making our society mediocre in every single way
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