Now It’s Really Time to Disrupt Education
/In a recent Manhattan Contrarian article, my dad pointed out that, by their own admission, the worst racists in our country are academics in our elite colleges and universities. Even as they make more and more efforts to improve their “diversity and inclusion” with committees, trainings, seminars, course curriculums, and town halls — just to name a few — by their own assessment, this has only resulted in more “systemic racism,” “oppression,” and “white supremacy.” Since that’s the case, it is time to question whether the model of elite-institutions-practicing-diversity-and-inclusion can ever bring society even one step closer to racial harmony — its stated intention — or if it’s only an exercise in punishment and disunion.
I’m going to take the next step and look at K-12 education. It’s there that we can see where cultural trends are headed over the next decade or so, and it is there that we might have an opportunity for disruption. The K-12 education landscape includes elite and less elite (e.g., Catholic) private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools. There’s enough diversity in the marketplace that we might be able to deduce if there’s a schooling model that shows promise in educating the minority kids, and potentially improving racial harmony more broadly.
The elite private schools have basically adopted the same “diversity and inclusion” model as the elite colleges and universities, and have had the same disappointing results. Even as the institutions take increasingly drastic measures to implement “antiracist” ideology and practices, the participants in the process, and particularly the students who are members of minority groups, report that their overall experience is one of continued racism. But, increased commitment to “antiracism” is the only proposed solution and it cannot be questioned, even as it fails miserably to end, or even combat, racism. The degree to which antiracist ideology has overcome these institutions has been much in the news lately, for example in a piece at City Journal on March 9 by Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times.
Here in New York City, the way elite private high schools currently recruit and retain low-income (and largely minority) students could be described as a 21st century version of busing: a tranche of scholarship students (e.g. from Prep-for-Prep) is brought into an environment that is majority white. And the white students at these schools are by no means representative of the whites in America as a whole; instead, they come from a very wealthy, hyper-privileged top-tier. There is then forced integration of the two wildly disparate groups. The results could at best be called mixed. And, because white students tend to expect minority students have come from a scholarship background, even students of color who are not on scholarships still often end up feeling stigmatized or uncomfortable. It’s a situation in which everybody loses.
As a private high school alum myself, I first noticed about a year ago that new Instagram accounts were popping up in my alumni network beginning with the phrase, “blackat” and ending with the name of a prep school, e.g. blackatfriendsseminary (my high school). A cursory search for “blackat” brings up accounts for most private schools in the tri-state area.
Here are a few select quotes:
There are hundreds of examples like this from the various “blackat” accounts. What comes through most strongly is the black students’ sense of otherness. Do schools create this environment, via excessive racial awareness? Or does it exist naturally when we try to create cohesion between two groups that are so un-alike — not just in skin color but in background, socioeconomics, and cultural experiences? Either way, it’s clear that antiracist ideology is not addressing their complaints.
I understand why minority and low-income parents would fight to get their kids a spot at a private school. Doing so can feel like giving your kid “a ticket to upward mobility.” In an Atlantic article from 2013, parent Michele Stephenson is quoted saying: "Students that came out of independent schools were well-prepared on the level of networking, internships, job and school opportunities — you name it — and we were offered great financial-aid incentives.” The article then recounts her surprise when her son’s experience at Dalton involves many emotional obstacles and isn’t the American dream she was expecting.
With abundant evidence piling up to suggest that scholarships to elite private schools are a mixed bag for minority students, and can only be offered to a small number of those students at most, it’s clear that these institutions can only ever play a minor role in addressing the “systemic racism” allegedly affecting society at-large. So what options remain for advancing the bulk of the minority and low-income students?
In New York City, the public schools have not been particularly good in a lifetime, and they have entered a period of extreme decline under Mayor de Blasio. StudentsFirstNY, a grassroots education advocacy group dedicated to improving public schools throughout New York State, reported in 2017 that “73,000 NYC students live in districts without a single quality middle school.” SFNY quotes several parents in those districts saying things like: “When just 11 percent of students at my daughter’s middle school can pass state math tests, something is horribly wrong. What message do we send to these kids when they have no options at such a critical point in their lives?” (Bronx Parent Alberto Trujillo, Middle School Desert District 12)
Says Kathryn Marrow, a parent in Harlem, “In my neighborhood, the only good middle school options are charter schools. I’m thankful that I found a charter middle school, but that’s no thanks to Mayor de Blasio who opposes them every chance he gets.”
So on the one hand, we have public schools experiencing such widespread failure that the NY Post reported in 2019 that over half of NYC kids can’t handle basic English or math on state tests. On the other hand, we have private schools offering a handful of scholarship spots into their gilded world — and those invited behind the gates, by all appearances, are unhappy and disenchanted. If these are the only options available to low-income and minority parents, then the reality is that they have no good options.
But there is a promising alternative: currently 13% of NYC public school students attend charter schools. Charters have struggled to gain a foothold in a political environment that is united against them. The same NY Post article that reported the failure of NYC public schools noted that the Success Academy charter school boasted top scores for their students with 99 percent passing math, and 90 percent passing English.
This is all the evidence we need to know that it’s time to turn the way we approach schooling on its head. This summer, I argued it was time for governments to give the government funding for students to the parents instead of the public schools. In NYC, the government spends $28,000 per student. Imagine what a parent could do with that level of financial freedom. That’s close to the price of the elite private schools, and more than enough to send a child to Catholic school, where tuition averages $7,500.
There is much to say about how and why public schools could be doing so terribly with so much funding at their disposal, while schools that receive substantially less funding are able to achieve superior results. But it’s safe to say that the landscape of schooling options would look radically different if parents had more agency and more choices, and if the public schools were subjected to market forces.
For years, Thomas Sowell has been making the case that competitive public (charter) schools are the solution for advancing the minority population at large. He proved the case in an essay he wrote way back in 1974 about the academically elite, historically black public high school, Dunbar High School, located in Washington, D.C. The title of the essay: “Black Excellence - The Case of Dunbar High School.” In it, he notes that Dunbar ranked #1 in citywide tests given to both black and white students. He also notes that, at a time when most Americans weren’t going to college, Dunbar graduates were attending Harvard, Amherst, and Oberlin.
Today, Dunbar’s glory days are far behind it. Sowell blames this on the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954. That decision, writes Sowell, led to a reorganization of the school system so that all D.C. schools became neighborhood schools, as opposed to exclusively teaching black students or white students. This also meant that schools could no longer be selective about which students they accepted; they served a neighborhood. If parents wanted to send their kids to another school, they’d have to move to another neighborhood.
And for Dunbar, this meant that it went from being desirable and academically elite, drawing black students from all over the metro area, to being relegated to serving one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city with the worst problems. Describing the outcome of the desegregation effort, Sowell writes:
“Neighborhood schools" was the rallying cry of whites resisting total desegregation; "integration" was the battle cry of black leaders. The maintenance of educational quality at a black elite high school had no such emotional appeal or political clout.
Since 1974, our society has not moved past Sowell’s assessment that for black Americans, “Isolated ‘successes’ or ‘heroes’ receive occasional attention, but large-scale or institutionalized progress, and excellence seem almost to be shunned.” If anything, the problem is worsening now with the antiracism obsession, by reinforcing the idea that blacks are perpetual “others” in a white world. Antiracism asks whites to bend over backward to accommodate blacks. It assumes that blacks are not otherwise capable of advancement. Dunbar’s success shows otherwise, and it shows a possible way forward.
School choice offers the potential for widespread achievement among minority and low-income students. The enemies to that success — unionized public schools — have been hiding in plain sight, letting successful private institutions take the blame for “systemic racism.” And the private schools have gone right along, admitting their guilt and shame and giving the public schools a way to deflect blame. But the public schools are the ones who created a situation in which minority students need to be lifted out of bad schools by private institutions in order to have access to opportunity. If that’s not the real racism, I don’t know what is.
Over time, with enough widespread progress among minorities, it’s likely that we could eliminate oil-in-water discomfort of feeling like an “other,” a “novelty,” or a “charity case.” That would go much further towards addressing “systemic racism” than the current “antiracist” ideology ever could. Let’s stop doubling down on failure; it’s time for a new course of action.