Tag: race

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A‑word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-​button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a‑word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-​oriented, class-​based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-​and-​social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-​up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-​minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Asian Privilege?

Seventy-​three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-​Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-​three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-​rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-​American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So … what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-​of-​wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-​of-​wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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family /​ mind /​ JG

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education and schooling ideological culture social media

Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-​choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-​Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-​member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-​linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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De-​colonize Our Music?

music, freedom

Music is, arguably, the crowning artistic achievement of our civilization. 

It grew out of many folk and ecclesiastical practices, but one of the great innovations that allowed both Bach and The Beatles, Beethoven and Broadway, Bartok and “beats,” is the theory of music. 

Which rests on that great innovation, musical notation.

Not my area of expertise, alas, but I tip my hat to the educators who know the physics and the art in precise and powerful ways.

Unfortunately, stupidly racist anti-​racism has infected even music education. The latest example? The University of Oxford is considering a plan to get rid of teaching music through teaching notation.

“Sheet music is now considered ‘too colonial,’” explains The Telegraph, “while Beethoven and Mozart, and music curriculums in general, are believed to have ‘complicity in white supremacy.’”

While mainly an attack on classical music, our popular music rests upon a lot of basic western technique, too. The idea that musical notation is racist is itself bizarrely racist. Do these people think because whites invented musical notation, non-​whites are oppressed by it? Yes, the opponents of western musical notation, who include “activist students” as well as “activist professors,” are apparently ashamed of a tradition focused on “white European music from the slave period.”

But until fairly recently, all civilization was “the slave period.” And Europe, which developed the tradition, wasn’t the world’s most slave-​ridden society during the period of western music’s development: Africa and Asia were. 

Slavery is bad. Very bad. Freedom is good. Very good. But you don’t reject good things because they once upon a time touched bad things. We can have both freedom and music. 

And musical notation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from William Creswell

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education and schooling tax policy

Race, Ignorance, Racism

Harrison Bergeron

Not spending millions more to hire and train swarms of Internal Revenue Service agents to poke, audit, investigate and squeeze more tax dollars from wealthier Americans would be — you knew this was coming — racist. 

That’s the new argument for siccing the IRS on wealthier Americans; they’re more likely to be white than black.

“The federal government is losing billions in unpaid taxes,” informs a Washington Post headline, “in part due to racial disparities in the tax code.”

What racially based inequalities, precisely?

“The inequity rests on long-​established tax breaks that favor White Americans over Black Americans in three areas — marriage, homeownership and retirement, according to Dorothy A. Brown, an Emory University law professor,” writes Post columnist Joe Davidson. Because, for instance, “White people … are much more likely to be homeowners,” and more likely than blacks “to work for companies that offer tax favored retirement plans.”

Davidson offered no further discussion of marriage.

One can argue for or against hiring more IRS agents. (I’m against.) But to calculate the merits based on the skin color of the people most likely to be investigated is … racist.

Where does such skewed logic lead?

“The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade,” Fox News reports, “effectively keeping higher-​achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.”

This statewide policy designed to hurt so many individual students — and to help none — is predicated on closing a racial gap in math performance. By knee-​capping the higher performing students of all races.*

So which is worse? That it’s a human rights violation … or that it is so incredibly stupid?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* As a candidate in this year’s Virginia House elections explained to The Federalist, the proposed statewide policy “is incredibly belittling, arrogant, and racist in assuming that children of color cannot reach advanced classes in math.”

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Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron

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