What If It’s Not All About Race?

One of my many complaints — probably my central complaint — about the Madison school district is its obsession with identity politics.

For a decade or more the district has fallen all over itself to find and address “systemic racism”. Most notoriously, it enacted its discredited Behavior Education Plan, which weakened the control teachers have over their own classrooms. The insanity of this was best illustrated a couple of years ago when a student carried a loaded gun to school. When Madison police were alerted and they came to arrest the student, a security guard and some teachers tried to interfere. The security guard screamed, “we’re supposed to be protecting these kids!” He was referring to protecting the kid with the gun, not the other kids who might have been shot. This is madness.

The central theme, adopted as a religious tenet, is that kids who aren’t white underperform as a group because of something in the system that is stacked against them. And yet, despite this view having taken hold for so long, the racial achievement gap is getting worse. And truancy among Black kids is higher than it is among others. If the schools were so welcoming to Black kids, why aren’t Black kids showing up?

White liberals with high-achieving kids would just as soon ignore those questions. Their kids can silo up into AP programs and do just fine. So, they’d prefer to be politically correct and not rock the boat as opposed to asking hard and inconvenient questions about the status quo.

So, here’s a radical idea. What if we stopped focussing on race? If we really cared about students of color maybe we’d stop thinking of them as just faceless members of a put-upon racial group. Because maybe the problem isn’t race at all. Maybe the better solution would be to admit that some kids are falling behind — regardless of race or other group characteristics — and treat them all as underperforming and in need of special help. In other words, the only thing that matters about underperforming students is that they underperform.

You can’t fix a problem until you define it correctly. If your transmission is the problem, you won’t fix it by filling up the gas tank. So, if you think race is the problem, but it isn’t, then you’re wasting resources and time by chasing your tail.

Here’s a quote from a story in the New York Times which appeared yesterday:

For example, in eighth grade math, the bottom 10 percent of proficient English speakers lost more ground than the lowest-scoring English learners, Mr. Aldeman found. Similarly, his analysis showed that the lowest-scoring students who did not have a disability fell more than the lowest-scoring students who did. The bottom scoring middle- and higher-income students lost more ground than the bottom low-income students.

This suggests that there is something about being a low-achieving student, regardless of background, that is driving the trend.

While the study quoted in the story didn’t deal specifically with race, the implications are clear. The issue is low-achieving students, not their English proficiency, their disability, their family income or their race.

The story goes on to single out Mississippi as a state that has defied the trend. They’ve defied it not by focussing on race, but by focussing on underachievers, regardless of race or any other group characteristic. With an emphasis on reading skills based on phonics and offering these students more attention, they’ve succeeded in lifting up students in the lowest achieving groups.

The story also makes George W. Bush look good for his No Child Left Behind program. While No Child was in place the lowest achieving students were making progress. Since that program more or less went away, standards and accountability have weakened and students have suffered.

That was underscored recently in Wisconsin when Superintendent Jill Underly changed test score reporting to make it look like more students were performing at grade level when nothing about their actual skills had improved. Wisconsin voters should have taken her to task for that, but they didn’t. Madison voters also rejected an excellent school board candidate who promised to focus on reading.

Based on all this here’s a program that might work:

1. Stop obsessing over race or any other factor and simply focus on underachieving kids, no matter their background.
2. Emphasize reading skills as the gateway to everything else and phonics as the best way to teach reading.
3. Reestablish discipline and good order in the schools. Backup teachers so that they can control their own classrooms and school administrators when they move to keep their corridors safe.
4. Get chronically disruptive kids out of the classrooms so that other students can learn.
5. Hold schools accountable. I’ve never understood the objection to “teaching to the test.” There are basic skills, mostly in reading and math, that kids need to learn before they can master anything else. If schools aren’t teaching kids those basics they need to be held accountable.

Unfortunately, in Madison and at DPI there’s no chance that this kind of program will take hold. Voters just resoundingly voted in favor of the failing status quo in their choices for Superintendent and the Madison school board. Expect more of the same for at least the next four years.

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