Whitewashing Their Failure

Much gnashing of teeth has been prompted by the curriculum war in public education - the effort to introduce Critical Race Theory and the concomitant argument over parents' roles in deciding what kids are taught. It became a flash point in the Virginia governor's election, and likely tipped the scales to the Republican, Glenn Youngkin.

Curriculum is not the only war, however.

New York State Senator John Liu has introduced legislation to shift authority over creation of charter schools solely to the Board of Regents, which is widely considered a puppet of the teachers' unions. Teachers' unions in New York (and elsewhere) are notoriously opposed to charter schools, which are often non-union, no matter that they widely outperform the mainstream public schools. The Left, which long ago chose teachers' unions over kids, has fought tooth-and-nail against charters since their inception.

Recently departed New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio didn't only side with the unions over the kids when it came to charter schools, he actively worked to degrade the top-tier education offerings within the public school system itself. Enrollment in the competitive "Elite Eight" public high schools, long based strictly on academic merit (i.e. an entrance exam), was to be scrapped in favor of some 'diversity' based system (DeBlasio ultimately failed).

The reason? Black and latino students comprise 66% of public school enrollment, but only 10% in the Elite Eight. Asian students, on the other hand, are 16% of total enrollment and 54% of the Elite Eight.

In Fairfax, VA, Thomas Jefferson HS, ranked the top high school in the nation, altered its "grades plus a competitive entrance exam" admission policy in order to shift the enrollment demographics (70% asian). Lawsuits ensued.

It's also widely recognized that many elite universities stack the deck against asian applicants.

Why all this anti-asian-child bias?

Consider the observation of comic Patrice O'Neal (a brilliant man who passed a few years ago):

White people and black people at war, then the other groups pick a side. Asians chose white. Latinos chose black.

The bit, obviously intended to elicit laughs, speaks (as good comedy often does) an underlying truth. Asians are a disfavored minority as far as the cultural agenda-setters are concerned, and we can presume it's because of, at least in part, their childrens' educational success.

That success is a stark indictment of the progressives' failure in its promise to help blacks and latinos across the past six decades. Asian ascendance in schools like Stuyvesant began in the late 1970s, and is almost certainly tied to cultural prioritization of education. Asians (most of whom arrived in the US after 1965) weren't "attended to" by progressive do-gooders the way blacks and latinos have been.

That attention, including but not limited to the War on Poverty and the Left's dominance in education, has produced exactly the opposite of what was promised. Rather than look at the fruits of their labor and reassess their approach, they unfortunately have chosen to blame their failures on everything but their policies. Outcome-based declarations of racism have become de rigeur, where any demographic disparity is presumed caused by "structural" or "institutional" racism.

Their remedy is to shoehorn their desired outcome into everything, by changing the rules of the game, by treating people unequally based on the color of their skin, and by refusing to accept any responsibility or accountability for their failures.

Why are they not asking themselves why, after half a century of running inner-city public schools, black and latino students are *not* performing as well on the high school entrance exams as asian and white students? It's not as if the tests are a surprise, it's not as if the subject material is a mystery. And, it's not as if there's evidence of disparate ability across the races - the success of almost-wholly black- and latino-populated charter schools in NYC makes that clear.

Because, it's safe to say, they'd have to accept that their worldview is flat-out wrong, that the progressivism they've devoted their lives to isn't working as intended, and that the people they hate might have had it right all along.

That cannot be tolerated, so instead, these 'white knights' whitewash their failures with quotas, with dumbing-down of enrollment standards, and with continued disservice to the groups they have long claimed to exclusively champion.