E-Pluribus | May 13, 2021

Focusing on all the wrong things in education, discipline quotas in classrooms, and a plea to ditch the term "systemic racism."

May 13, 2021

A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Bob McManus: Cancel the Columbus, Keep the Dysfunction

New York City’s public schools face serious issues. But rather than improve the education of students, the city seems more focused on tinkering with the aesthetics. Bob McManus writes at City Journal that, in doing so, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials end up pleasing (and helping) no one.

Then, crosshairs were laid on programs meant to assist so-called “gifted and talented” children, on high-performing middle schools, and especially on the city’s world-class selective-entry high schools, now increasingly dominated by Asian children. The result has been community turmoil and barely camouflaged threats from high places—witness Ross Porter’s reference to “our students.” Meantime, objective performance benchmarks—never robust—have been eroded to the point where high school graduating-class valedictorians need serious remedial work to perform at the community college level.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Columbus-cancellation passes for substantive policy debate these days. Nobody has a stomach for real issues, including New York’s field of mayoral aspirants, who present a range of well-crafted, if largely disingenuous, education positions. None hints, for example, at the fact that a vast majority of the city’s African-American students come from single-parent households, that most Asian students do not—and that this, rather than racial bias, doutbless drives disparate academic outcomes.

Read the whole thing.

Jason L. Riley: Classroom Chaos in the Name of Racial Equity Is a Bad Lesson Plan

At The Wall Street Journal, Jason L. Riley also takes on the seeming inability of the public education system in this country to simply educate students. Rather than allowing teachers and administrators to maintain discipline that fosters a better learning environment, the Biden administration is returning to the Obama administration-era policies that seek to impose discipline quotas, hurting the very students they intend to help.

In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—the nation’s three largest school systems—reductions in suspensions and expulsions were followed by an uptick in bullying and other disruptive behavior. Students and teachers alike have reported feeling less safe. Fighting, gang activity and drug use have increased. A 2018 study of schools in Wisconsin found that “softer discipline policies, pushed by the Obama administration, are having a negative impact on student test scores.”

The sad irony is that black students, in whose name this was done, were the ones most hurt by racial quotas in school discipline. A 2017 federal survey of school safety by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic group.
[…]
The unwillingness of these critics even to consider nonracial explanations for group differences in school discipline rates is also troubling. In a 2019 report by the Institute for Family Studies, sociologists Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox found that black students living with both married parents had suspension rates that not only were less than half as large as those for other blacks, but also less than the suspension rate for white students from families that weren’t intact. Statistical disparities can’t automatically be equated with discrimination, and pretending otherwise can lead to bad policies that harm the very people you want to help.

Read it all at The Wall Street Journal.

John McWhorter: Can We Please Ditch The Term "Systemic Racism"?

Though he recognizes the futility of the plea, John McWhorter writes of his distaste for the term “systemic racism.” McWhorter does not deny the existence of racial inequities, but argues that the term is misleading and does nothing to address the underlying causes to help close the gaps that are present.

First let’s review what systemic racism means. There are inequities between whites and blacks. The reason is not that blacks are inherently less capable than whites. This presumably means that the discrepancies are traceable to devaluation of black people of some kind at some point in the pathway. This devaluation, even if not conscious, is a kind of racism, and this means that the society “is racist.” Thus the way to get rid of this kind of discrepancy is to undo the racism in the system.

But note that if we take this as a succession of logical statements rather than as a musical sequence valuable primarily because the term racism is intoned within it, then we hit a snag. Just what do we do to undo “racism” that is bound up in a complex system, and especially given that the system has a past that is unreachable to us now, as well as a present?

Here, The Elect burn to insist that, well, systemic racism exists anyway! And you the reader may want to reiterate that systemic racism exists. It does. There are indeed such discrepancies. The question is not whether they exist, but what one does about them.

“Undoing the racism in the system,” in this light, is word magic, not an intelligent prescription for change in the real world. Grouchy? Not really – just grounded.

Read it all.