Darker Aspects

 

"Wit & Wisdom," an English language arts curriculum, has been widely criticized in recent weeks by Williamson County parents.... Arguments against the curriculum fall into two buckets. The first being the belief that "Wit & Wisdom" content isn't appropriate for younger students, and the second being that the curriculum teaches concepts of critical race theory.

Community members and local advocacy organizations have come forward in disapproval of books like "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," "Separate is Never Equal," and "George vs. George," their argument being that teaching about the darker aspects of racism in United States history isn't appropriate in elementary grades. 

One of the most vocal groups has been the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty started earlier this year. The group includes members with children in and outside of Williamson County Schools. [Moms for Liberty head Robin Steenman] said she disapproves of guidance for teachers to teach words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation" in grammar lessons.

—Anika Exum, Nashville Tennesseean, 11 June 2021

Long, long ago, there was a kindly, Republican chief justice called Earl Warren, and one day he heard that some people in Topeka were not judging children by the content of their character. Not in Tennessee! Topeka is in Kansas.

It was true. In those days there were schools in America where there were no African American children! This is hard for you to imagine, since schools in America are not like that now, except if your Mom for Liberty schools you at home or a special religious liberty school or if you don't have a lot of African American people in your neighborhood for some reason. Some people have a shortage of African American children in their neighborhood! That has nothing to do with your parents or their mortgage broker!

Trepidation Now, Trepidation Forever

I think it's Hindi. From somebody's tumblr.

David Brooks's headline, "Integration Now, Integration Forever" (which I'm pretty sure he wrote himself, as marked by the fact that it's in the url), composed by palimpsest over George Wallace's famous cry of defiance of 1963, sounds like a pretty stirring call to action that I wouldn't want to be arguing with, but what he came up with is more ambivalent, on more than one dimension, indeed so ambivalent that it doesn't make any sense at all:

Shorter:

The prospect of racial integration in the United States, which seemed so promising in the 1960s as the integration of the school system began, has clearly failed, gone the way of the gramophone and the nylon stocking, as people failed to create intimate bonds across racial lines, as Tamar Jacoby observed 20 years ago. This depressing outcome is probably because integrating schools was the wrong way to go. The authorities should have begun by integrating neighborhoods instead. This is proven by the fact that neighborhoods have become more integrated over time, and people have created intimated bonds across racial lines, as intermarriage rates have climbed and churches have become multiracial. Therefore we need to integrate neighborhoods by building public housing in low-poverty areas, eliminating exclusionary zoning, and more gentrification, and schools will integrate themselves. Also everybody should join an organization where they meet once a week with people who are different from themselves.

Terrifyingly, this glass is half-empty! Fortunately, it's half-full! We must do something to rectify this situation by making it more the way it already is, I think!

Town and Brown

The New York Times has been commemorating the 58th anniversary (May 17) of Brown v. Board of Education with a series of articles dealing with the fact that American schools are still segregated by race (in a beautifully written thick-description feature by N.R. Kleinfield describing the consequences of segregation at a charter middle school in Flatbush, Brooklyn), the apparent fact that the authorities don't seem to see any reason for doing anything about it (David L. Kirk's op-ed asking why school reformers have abandoned desegregation as a way of narrowing the school achievement gaps between racial groupings), and the widespread belief that it really isn't a problem anyway (in an 8-way debate—"Jim Crow is dead, segregation lives on. Is it time to bring back busing? "—about what needs to be done).

Really! That is, some of the debaters thought desegregation was a pretty good thing and worth reviving, of course, but others seemed not to understand why it was even an issue; according to Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute, for instance,

From Babble Voices.

Falling back to 1970s-style desegregation policies like busing ignores new schooling options that weren’t available decades ago and which offer better educational opportunities for minority students.

As if the original desegregation policies had merely been techniques for wringing inefficiencies out of the system. It's like arguing that there's no point in enforcing anti-slavery laws because there are better ways of maximizing profit for cotton cultivators. School segregation is illegal, according to the law of the land as established in Brown in 1954, and it is illegal because it is wrong—because it deprives people of certain rights guaranteed them in our constitution.

It was amazing to me to see in these essays, as also in the reader comments, how many apparently respectable people don't seem to know that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was decided wrongly; that separate can never be equal. Kirk's article makes it seem, in fact, as if the Supreme Court has effectively overruled Brown and restored Plessy to its original status, in the sense that it has been gradually disallowing all the means for desegregating. (Indeed, the reputedly evil Michelle Rhee was actually on the left side of this one, since she argues in the Times debate for "socioeconomic integration", i.e., for a method of achieving racial integration without mentioning race, which might make it acceptable to the Court and effective at the same time.)

In particular the proponents of various kinds of "school choice" and charter school approaches appear genuinely to believe that separate but equal institutions are possible. They emphasize the spiffiness and modernity of the charter school or Small School of Choice, its advanced electronic equipment, its youthful (underpaid) teachers. Izumi even cites a fraudulent "proof" of the high quality of the new schools in terms of what a spiffy study it was

The study used the most rigorous experimental design, randomized control trial...

(It may be a rigorous design,  but it's not very rigorously applied; in fact, an absolutely crappy study—I've discussed the work in question at some length here.)

But if you look at the typical features of these new schools—the high ratio of administrators to teaching staff, the focus on high-stakes test scores and test prep, the elaborate discipline and dress codes, the de-skilling of teachers who are often required to stick to a script—you can see that they are not at all equal to the kind of school you want for your own children, in spite of the bells and whistles. They're not meant to instill habits of critical thinking but of swift obedience. They're not meant for "our kids" but for "their kids". And Brown has not yet become irrelevant.

Finnish blackboard. From Dipity.

Crazy kind of loving there...

Segregation Map of Kansas City, Missouri, Census Year 2000, by the photographer Eric Fischer; each dot represents 25 people, color-coded by race: pink is White, blue is Black, orange is Hispanic and Latino, and green is Asian.

Somebody at Kos posted a discussion of a Very Disturbing Report on Education today, produced by the Cato Institute and proving or purporting to prove that increased school funding doesn't help to improve educational outcomes. Oh, dear, I thought, and took a look at the report itself—Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by one Paul Ciotti—to see if I could find some holes in its methodology.

Well, I didn't need to worry myself about that in particular, since it turns out that the thing was published in 1998, that's 14 years ago, and actual scholars have had time to identify all the holes already. And have done so, too.

Ciotti's report is the story of the lawsuit filed in 1977 by the Kansas City Board [jump]