Real ‘Systematic Racism’: Blocking Reform & Suppressing Education – by Jim Bratten

The Wall Street Journal of June 24, 2020 reported, “Forty-five senators block police reform from hitting the floor… It’s no accident that California Senator Kamala Harris led the filibuster as she campaigns to be Joe Biden’s running mate.” Democrats can’t allow police reform; it would take away their campaign issue of “systemically racist police.” More recently, this was Kamala Harris on police reform: “This work is long overdue. America has a long history of systemic racism” (only since Democrats invented it as a political wedge issue).

Police departments, however, are not where systemic racism is found. As Steve Hilton of Fox News said in his extensive coverage of this issue, “America is the least racist nation on earth. If you want to see actual, wide-spread racism, just look at California’s public school system.”

As reported by the Reason Foundation on December 10, 2019 in their study, California Schools Are Failing Black Students, “Statewide, large achievement gaps between black and white students persist in all subjects—with an astounding 41 point difference in 8th-grade math and a 38 point difference in 8th-grade reading…researchers often equate 10 points as roughly one year’s worth of learning.”

However, California’s school system isn’t the lone offender; it’s very common in most “blue” cities. This headline appeared in The Seattle Times on May 9, 2016: “Seattle Schools Have Biggest White-Black Achievement Gap in State.” No one paid attention to this revelation in Seattle; the city’s educators ignored it. Three-and-a-half years later, this headline appeared in the Times on November 20, 2019: “Seattle Public Schools has a New Performance Report. The Achievement Gap Isn’t Part of It.” How convenient, but why frame failure?

In New York City, a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) study from 2019 found that, in math proficiency in grades three through eight, white students were 67% proficient while black students were only 36.3% proficient. In Baltimore this disparity is so bad that, among 13 city high schools, there were zero black graduates proficient in math. (But they graduated anyway.) Last year, the “blue” schools added a new excuse for black deficiency: it’s the pandemic.

Washington, DC faces the same problems as Seattle, New York City, and California schools in poor performance by black children. In The Washington Post of October 30, 2020 the headline read, “In D.C., Achievement Gap Widens, Early Literacy Progress Declines During Pandemic, Data Show.” Inside the article we find that, “At the beginning of the [2020] academic year, the number of black children who met the literacy benchmarks dropped by 14 percentage points, to 31 percent. For White students, it dropped six points, to 67 percent.”

The headline in the Gothamist on March 21 read: “NYC Public Schools with the Worst Attendance Are in Areas with Higher COVID Rates” The article stated, “the majority of the schools with a high number of absences are located in black and brown communities hit hardest by the pandemic…” So open the schools!

The Wall Street Journal of June 18, 2020 highlighted a reason why “union schools” (government/public schools) fight the charter school movement. In the WSJ piece, Charter Schools’ Enemies Block Black Success, we find, “All charter school classes at the same grade levels in the same buildings did better—including six grade levels where the charter school majorities reaching the ‘proficient’ level ranged from 81% to 100%.” The Seattle Times of January 13, 2019 and the Los Angeles Daily News of May 1, 2019 had similar findings: black students in charter schools perform better and have more “days of learning.”

For decades, black children have been discriminated against in government school systems, their learning abilities suppressed. This sounds like real systemic racism to me.

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