Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have a point about structural racism. But it’s probably not the point the Queens Democrat and her progressive allies think it is.
For if ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big city public-school systems. By any objective measure, these schools consistently fail to provide their African-American students with the basic education they will need to get ahead. But instead of addressing achievement head on, the progressive answer is to funnel yet more money into the existing failed structure, eliminate tests that expose its failure, and impose race-based preferences to make up for it.
Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth graders in their care are proficient in either math or reading.
It isn’t even close. In a number of these school districts, proficiency rates for black eighth graders are down in the single digits (see Detroit’s 4% for math and 5% for reading, or Milwaukee’s 5% for math and 7% for reading). Most are in the low teens.
In
Bill de Blasio’s
New York City, for example, the public schools show 10%
proficiency for black eighth graders in math and 14% in English. Yet the
mayor then professes to be shocked, shocked that black students aren’t passing the highly competitive entrance exams for the city’s most elite public high schools..............To Read More...
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