You won’t believe this next story. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a quiet exposé story headlined, “
To Shrink Learning Gap, This District Offers Classes Separated by Race.” They used to call it “segregation” when you separated students by race, and that used to be
bad. Literally loathsome.
For years, the school district in Evanston, Illinois — just north of Chicago — has been wrestling with an intractable racial achievement gap. “Our black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom. Consistently.
Still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” Evanston school board vice president Monique Parsons explained at a recent school board meeting.
At the risk of stating the obvious, vice president Parsons added, “It’s not good.”
A few years back, the Evanston school district discretely decided to try something new down at the high school: they’d become aware of a stealthy new educational program, that has been silently and mysteriously appearing all over the bluest areas of the country like crop circles. And it had appeared in Evanston Independent School District.
The 100% voluntary program is hard to pin down. It is obliquely referenced from place to place using various uninformative labels, of varying degrees of euphemistic excess. In Evanston’s case, they are periphrastically called “affinity classrooms.” But all the programs involve creating core academic programs segregated by student race.
In other words, white kids get white teachers and stay with white kids. Black and latino kids get black teachers and learn alongside only their melanin-comparable peers. Even Steven.
When pressed, educators who support the new segregation claim the segregated classrooms — again, purely voluntary — can improve minority performance, because feelings of inferiority interfere with learning whenever white kids are around. “A lot of times within our education system, black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” explained Dena Luna, an administrator in charge of “black student-achievement initiatives” in Minneapolis Public Schools.
The Journal didn’t seem to be too bullish on the results, but also seemed skittish about directly criticizing the programs, too. The best results the Journal could find were, well, lackluster. A 2017 internal study of a voluntary segregation program in Oakland showed
slightly improved attendance for black boys, and
slightly improved average GPAs of 2.27, compared with a
slightly lower average of 2.14 for black boys in non-segregated classrooms.
But the lethargic results aren’t stopping anything. The new segregation is spreading anyways.
The new segregation comes with lots of bold new euphemisms, like the aforementioned “affinity classrooms” in Illinois. In Minneapolis, they are called capital-B “Black Spaces” where black students don’t have to act like lowercase-w white kids. “In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness,” Administrator Luna said proudly.
It was not immediately obvious what being “rooted in Blackness” means, exactly, or how algebra that is “rooted in Blackness” might be different from regular algebra.
Unlike many other diversity initiatives, for some reason, they don’t seem to want to talk about this new, improved segregation. The WSJ noted in its article that it tried its best to get comments from Evanston’s high-school district officials, board members, and teachers — who all either declined or ignored the paper’s repeated requests for comment on the district’s affinity courses, over a several month period.
It was like they’d all agreed to keep quiet.
And when a Wall Street Journal reporter tried to attend a
public meeting for parents of black students about affinity classrooms, the district’s spokeslady curtly stated she would cancel the meeting unless the reporter left.
When I went to law school, we spent two weeks in my Constitutional Law class on
Brown v. Board of Education, the seminal Supreme Court case holding that segregated classrooms are illegal. It is fair to point out that, in
Brown, the segregation was mandatory, and hence unconstitutional.
But segregation has a ghastly history in this country, and it is unclear from any of the data cited in the article that the segregated affinity classes produced anything but marginal improvements, which could easily be due to a self-selection bias. In other words, the black kids who are voluntarily choosing affinity classes are more likely to be kids who try harder in general.
The most difficult fact about this story is that 1950’s segregationists would surely now be saying “I told you so.” I don’t know the answer, probably nobody does, but I suspect that achievement gaps are more likely to be related to
disciplinary issues.
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