It still makes me gag to see people I think well of—Roy Romer, J.C. Watts, Joel Klein—sharing a letterhead with the lamentable and reprehensible Al Sharpton. Much as I agree with the core principles of the Education Equality Project and pleased as I would be if they and the Strong American Schools (aka ED in 08) crowd successfully persuade the moderators to inject education into the two remaining presidential debates, Sharpton’s name on that press release carries a most unpleasant whiff of racialism, anti-Semitism, exploitation and corruption that taints the entire venture. (See here and here.) Aside from all that, the paltry place that education occupies this election season is symbolized by the letter’s pleading tone. (Please, sir, could I have some more?) Sure it would great to hear the candidates say more on the topic—after they’ve dealt with the Wall Street meltdown, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, health care and climate change.

Augustine Romero defends the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American/Raza Studies Department (read about it here), of which he is the senior director. I’m unconvinced by his words.

From that Ed Next poll, this caught my eye:

Race- and Income-based School Integration

Education Next/PEPG survey results show that 63 percent of the public are opposed to assigning students to schools based on racial background in order to promote school diversity, a practice banned by the Supreme Court in 2007.

• Only 16 percent say that districts “definitely” or “probably” should be allowed to take students’ racial background into account; 21 percent of the public are unsure.
• Among African Americans, only 30 percent think districts should be allowed to take race into account.
• Surprisingly, on the question of assigning students to schools based on family income—a strategy now being considered by many districts as an alternative to race-based policies—the opposition is even greater. Only 13 percent support the idea; 62 percent are opposed and the remainder uncertain.

My gambit this morning didn’t work to spark a full-fledged office debate, but I did entice Amber to respond to my prompt about whether the “end of black politics” is good for school reform. And I’m glad she did, because her post is characteristically thoughtful and illuminating. Amber, we miss your blogging! (Yes, we all have day jobs, and in Amber’s case a pipeline full of interesting research studies in need of tending.)

My answer to this question is unequivocal: yes, it’s great for school reform that the old-line civil rights groups are losing their monopoly as spokespeople for the “black community” and that new leaders such as Cory Booker are rising to power and influence. Partly that’s because the Bookers of the world tend to be much more open to school choice and other promising reforms (though there are always exceptions; see Deval Patrick for instance). But mostly that’s because the traditional civil rights groups have been in bed with the teachers unions forever, muting their advocacy for change.

And maybe it’s the rise of a new generation of leadership that is forcing the civil rights community to start to break with the unions. (My friend Rick Hess credits NCLB for driving a stake between the civil rights groups and the unions; that’s probably true, too.) Al Sharpton might represent the “old black politics,” but his Educational Equity Project is all about the new.

For years, black voters have expressed support for greater parental choice, more accountability, and meaningful reform of our schools. And for years, many black politicians opposed these policies, marching in lockstep with the unions. So yes, let the new black politics begin, because it’s good for education reform—which is really good for black children (along with everybody else).

Mike links to this fascinating article by Matt Bai in yesterday’s NYT and asks us to consider whether the “end of black politics” is good for education reform.  Obviously, one must first agree with Bai’s primary assumption that “old black politics”—the civil rights kind—is essentially on its way out. He says Obama and other new-generation black leaders aren’t comfortable categorizing their politics by race. Cory Booker for instance, mayor of Newark, seems to breathe a sigh of relief at the exodus of the old guard. He says the Obama campaign “is giving African-Americans like myself the courage to  be themselves.”

Bai contends that the inequities in today’s society aren’t as blatant as the legal barriers that once existed in the civil rights movement—they are subtler now. He mentions inferior schools as an example of this subtler inequality. If Bai is right about the curtain call for black politics, I think it’s good for education reform. It’s absolutely true that urban schools have less able teachers and notoriously low expectations for students. But to insinuate that this phenomenon originates from the same hate-filled intentions of the 50’s and 60’s (the water hose footage will forever be heart-wrenching) is not only wrong, but a disservice to the kids in failing schools.  Urban schools are currently failing students for a number of reasons but linking those reasons to bigotry only serves to deny the monumental contributions of civil rights leaders.

I taught in an urban high school once upon a time. The 50’s-era building had no A/C, but it did have a metal detector and two security guards. We scored at the bottom of the district heap every year. That is, until a reform-oriented principal forced all staff to align their instruction to the district’s already solid standards and assess students regularly to determine progress. Not long afterward, the entire district won the coveted Broad Prize for reducing the achievement gap.

We weren’t failing those kids because they were minority children; we were failing them because we had ignored standards-based, data-driven instruction.

I’m curious what my colleagues think; check out Matt Bai’s New York Times Magazine piece on the inter-generational battle going on within the black political elite. This is the heart of his argument:

In this way, post-Black Power politicians like [Philadelphia Mayor Michael] Nutter and [Newark Mayor Cory] Booker embody the principal duality of modern black America. On one hand, they are the most visible examples of the highly educated, entrepreneurial and growing black middle class that cultural markers like “The Cosby Show” first introduced to white Americans in the 1980s. According to an analysis by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, almost 37 percent of black families fell into one of the three top income quintiles in 2005, compared with 23 percent in 1973. At the same time, though, these black leaders are constantly confronted in their own cities and districts by blighted neighborhoods that are predominately black, places where poverty collects like standing water, breeding a host of social contagions.

That both of these trend lines can exist at once poses some difficult questions for black leaders and institutions. Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the evils and objectives were relatively clear: there were discriminatory laws in place that denied black Americans their rights as citizens, and the goal was to get those laws repealed and to pass more progressive federal legislation at the same time. You marched and you rallied and—if you had the bravery of a James Clyburn or a John Lewis—you endured blows to the head and to the spirit, and eventually the barriers started to fall. Things become more complicated, and more confounding, however, when those legal barriers no longer exist and when millions of black Americans are catapulting themselves to success. Now the inequities in the society are subtler—inferior schools, an absence of employers, a dearth of affordable housing—and the remedies more elusive.

I’ll weigh in later.

Kevin Carey’s latest post is about affirmative action, and most of it is sensible. I’m unsure if what you’ll read here are positions that Carey has previously espoused on this topic, and I’m not going to traipse off on some fishing expedition to find out. Suffice it to say that Carey, who is a good sport for joining our podcast last week (and who has, a little Gadfly told me, even befriended ["friended," as the kids say] Thomas B. Fordham through facebook), is at least this morning on the blog-related up-and-up. But wee problems remain. He writes:

I’m in favor of racial preferences in college admissions as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools and have to live with legacy of historical racism along with discrimination that still exists today. But somehow affirmative action has gotten turned around so that the primary justification is now that it’s good for white people. [emphasis mine]

Now, look. Affirmative action hasn’t just somehow changed, somehow morphed, into a policy by which privileged whites can expiate past wrongs and rid themselves of guilt. Nor has affirmative action been somehow warped such that now its justification is to produce on campuses a perceived racial diversity that allows privileged whites to feel, you know, better about things. These are what affirmative action has, in fact, always been about. Carey supports racial preferences “as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools” and who live day-to-day with discrimination—and that’s a fine, if arguable, position to take. It is not fine, though, to survey the country’s obsession with race in education and be shocked, shocked that the policies we have do little for the station of poor blacks and lots for the esteem of rich whites.

That’s what Mona Charen argues in this National Review Online piece,* using No Child Left Behind as Exhibit A. Much to his dismay, they don’t seem to love him back.

* Shameless plug alert: She mentions Fordham’s recent high-achieving students study, too.

I said I’d do it, and I meant it. We begin with this portion from our latest “watch-worthy” post (the basic point of which is that the blogger does not like gender-based college admissions preferences but is fine with race-based ones):

Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole.

Affirmative action “counteracts” the fact that minority students (black and Latino students, really) in general “enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students” only insofar as it overlooks those credentials. Affirmative action does nothing to solve the underlying problem, which is a yawning gap between the qualifications of black and Latino college applicants and those of their white and Asian counterparts. Instead, it simply ignores the disparity and gives leniency to applicants of lesser academic qualifications as long as they manage to be black or Latino, which is troublesome for all sorts of reasons.

Then there’s this:

Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn’t hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.

It’s unclear a) what this means (”...brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance,” for example. We wonder: A balance with what?), and b) why this is crucial or even desirable; furthermore, it’s not true. Why not true? Because we have a finite pool of black and Latino college applicants. And if a number of those who are most qualified to attend the University of Michigan are instead accepted, because of their ethnicities, at Yale (a school at which their standardized test scores and classroom preparation and grades are well below the incoming class’s average), then the University of Michigan must look further down its list. And Michigan then accepts less-qualified individuals, which counts, in my book, as being “hurt” by a selective college’s affirmative action policies. (Of course, the most selective schools are choosing, technically, to “hurt” themselves.)

Thus, we have this: Yale accepts a black student whose qualifications are average for the University of Michigan, Michigan accepts a black student whose resume would be appropriate at Florida State, and Florida State fills its classes with black and Latino students whose credentials reflect those of their community college peers.

But forget all that. We should be less worried, of course, about whether affirmative action is unfair to colleges than whether it is unfair to white and Asian students (who may be qualified for, say, Yale but whose spots are given to less-qualified applicants of a different race) or to the black and Latino students who are accepted at schools that they are, on paper, less ready to attend than are the majority of their classmates.

One wonders: What convincing argument shows that an under-qualified student at Yale will fare there so much better than he would at the University of Michigan, where his credentials match those of his classmates? And how do the advantages of accepting that student to Yale outweigh the disadvantages of a) discriminating against a better qualified white or Asian applicant because of his race and b) judging the black student simply because of his race? I’ve never encountered a convincing or logical justification for this.

“Making up for past transgressions” (i.e., slavery, Jim Crow, and all the other terrible stuff) doesn’t justify it, on any level. First, what if the black applicant’s family comes from, say, France? Second, how, exactly, does pushing into Yale a black kid who’s qualified for the University of Michigan make up for slavery? Third, for what, exactly, is the U.S. atoning when the Cuban kid (or the Venezuelan kid, etc.) gets an affirmative action bump into a selective college? Fourth, fifth, sixth....

Another insufficient response is this: Affirmative action is just like, say, legacy admissions, and nobody raises a stink about those. First, two wrongs don’t make a right. And second, affirmative action is not akin to legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are made on a per-person basis, and they do not assume anything about the legacy students. Legacy students are admitted because someone in their family attended the school in question; it’s unfortunate good ol’ boy stuff. Affirmative action policies, in contrast, are not predicated on a per-person basis—they are based on generalizations and, truthfully, stereotypes about all black and Latino applicants. Legacy admissions are unfortunate, but race-based admissions are noxious and really should be illegal but for the perplexing reasoning of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Finally (not really, but finally for this post’s purposes), we read:

But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she’s still going to college somewhere.

We wonder why this exact situation doesn’t pertain to black and Latino applicants, too. And then we realize it does.

My take on yesterday’s New York Times Magazine piece on “integration” is here. (I’m not employing around integration so-called “contemptuous quotes“; I’m merely noting that the terms “integration” and “segregation,” which once were used to denote, respectively, the de jure combination and separation of black and white students, are today used in reference to de facto racial separation caused by housing patterns. But the two different meanings are too often conflated, which is why we must call attention to the way in which they’re used.)

One part of the Times Magazine article that I didn’t have enough space to explore is the idea that new class+race school assignments hold much promise for significantly elevating academic achievement. This contention is, I think, a real stretch, especially when so many other curricular and instructional and management reforms (many of which do not involve complicated schemes) would do so much more to boost student learning. I suspect that not a few diversity proponents have simply realized that fluffier justifications for busing pupils hither and yon do not, for most parents, outweigh the flaws of complicated school assignment plans. Thus the shift toward couching arguments for school diversity in terms of increasing academic performance.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports on a demographic shift that could potentially bring more diversity to inner-city schools... potentially.

Photo by Flickr user blackheritage.

Why don’t we round up some Los Angeles high school students, put them in a room together, and ask them to pontificate about why Asian students do better academically than Latino students? I’m sure what they say will be revelatory; I’m sure we’re not wasting their time and filling their heads with nonsense.

Mica Pollock, an “anthropologist of education,” which I assume means that she excavates fossilized Australopithecus pencil boxes in the Olduvai Gorge, graciously comments about my last post (in which I quoted from an interview with her about her new book):

I too believe in clarity. I’ll use shorter sentences for you. These come straight from my book, Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School.

Antiracism in education involves:

1. Rejecting false notions of human difference

2. Acknowledging lived experiences shaped along racial lines

3. Learning from diverse forms of knowledge and experience

4. Challenging systems of racial inequality.

Brevity doesn’t equal clarity, and I remain befuddled. For instance, if #1 and #3 refer to race—that is, if race is a false notion of difference and also the diversity to which #3 refers—which I think they do, then is it not the case that #1 contradicts #3? Come to think of it, what does #3 actually mean? I recently wrote a piece about how one school district attempts to teach “diverse forms of knowledge and experience,” and it didn’t sound like that district was doing a very good thing at all. And how are teachers supposed to go about attending to #4? Are they to teach math and science and history, or are they to do more #2ish-type educating? And how does this all relate to Australopithecus?

Here’s more on TJ, i.e, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Thusly titled was Dorothy Rabinowitz’s article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, a piece that looked at the race-based shenanigans that affected one student at Purdue University.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham intern Amy Ballard.

Stafford points out the recent Washington Post article on the apparent diversity crisis at TJ. She’s right: blaming the school for its demographics is ridiculous. However, as a former TJ student, I have a few more things to say about the never-ending diversity debate.

All it’s doing is hurting the students. I was a member of the 2001 entering class that saw a lamentable nosedive in minority student enrollment (cited in the article as the beginning of the current diversity discussion). Yes, the numbers of African American and Hispanic students were low, but my nine black and Hispanic classmates were forced to stand under a negative spotlight for their entire four years of high school. They stood out in the crowd, not for their accomplishments or ambitions like many TJ kids, but for their race. Asian American students were forced to justify being there in numbers disproportionate to the surrounding population and endure racial jabs like “Asian F” or “Asian fail” (both referring to a B+). White students became hypersensitive to their classmates’ and friends’ races, a consideration neither necessary nor helpful when being assigned a lab partner or gym buddy.

At one point, the discussion got into sex (the school was 60/40 boys/girls and it had people worrying). When, during my junior year, I told my counselor during college sessions that I was more interested in the liberal arts than in science and math, I was informed that it was entirely possible that I had gotten through the second round of admissions to TJ solely because I was a girl and “there was a big push on that your year.” There was even a brief uproar over the diversity of the teachers and administrators! The single-minded focus on race and sex (read: visible) diversity takes away from the rather rich diversity that does exist (my graduating class contained a concert-level pianist and violinist, several students who had completed undergraduate math requirements, a published short story author, and a student who deferred college admission to spend a year in NOLS) and is detrimental to the cultural education of the students at TJ. It’s hard to grasp concepts like fairness and equality when everyone is constantly telling you your school has neither.

As an alum, people often ask me about the diversity at TJ, rather than the rigor of the all-Honors classes or the merit of the tech labs and mentorships required of seniors. Instead, they ask me if I knew any black kids or if my classes consisted entirely of Asian students. All of that detracts from the ultimate goal of schools like TJ—the academic achievement and intellectual accomplishments of the best pupils. Each time TJ posts the country’s highest SAT scores or tops AP marks in both Physics and US Government, someone says, “Yeah, but where are the minority students?” Asking that question devalues the time and energy the students and teachers at TJ spend every year to produce not only top scores and future Ivy Leaguers but valuable experiences in the areas of research, writing, technology, science, and math. The admissions process is not a result of the students who participate in it or of the students who attend the high school or even of the teachers who teach there. The debate over the admissions policy needs to be kept out of the halls of the school itself. When I was a student there and people asked me about the diversity “problem” I would tell them that we weren’t black students or white students or Asian students or Hispanic students or nerds or geeks—we were TJ kids and there was no problem.

Photo by Flickr user via.

In Washington Post front-page news this morning, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA, has reported its freshman class of 2012 will be 45 percent Asian—and only 42 percent white. Crisis! (Really, though, front page news? Come on.) In response, the Fairfax County School Board has promised to investigate the magnet school’s admissions policy. But “T.J.,” as the school is known to its friends, is simply responding to the last 10 years of court cases in this area, which have overturned affirmative action policies at many selective public high schools. Instead of quotas, T.J. is rightly using a mix of grades, test scores, race, gender, and socioeconomic status to make its decisions—just like many of the top universities. John Johnson of the minority student oversight committee is spot on when he says that middle school preparation programs and quota-based admissions policies are not going to miraculously catch up a student who has “been behind the eight ball since kindergarten.”

There’s only one lesson to be learned here for the Fairfax County School Board, and an investigation of the school’s admissions policy is not it. Instead of inappropriately faulting a high-performing magnet school for choosing high-performing candidates, why don’t we work on making sure more students are prepared to go to schools like T.J. in the first place? Huh, that’s a thought.

The National Council of La Raza is headquartered one block from our office. Despite what their spokesmen may or may not tell you, “La Raza” means “The Race,” and it’s a term that has gained an impressive toehold in some k-12 public schools as “Raza studies.” (It’s on college campuses, too, of course. One can earn a B.A. in Raza Studies from the University of San Francisco, for example, and then graduate fully prepared for a life of grievance and groaning.) Here’s an article detailing the Raza nonsense peddled in some Tucson, Arizona, high schools. If you’re into this type of thing, perhaps in order is a junket to the 10th Annual Institute for Transformative Education seminar, sponsored by the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American/Raza Studies Department and the University of Arizona College of Education.

Classroom teachers will have the opportunity to learn from and work with the leading scholars in the areas of Latino critical race theory, critical race theory, critical multicultural education, Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and critical race pedagogy.

It’s incredible, really.

Speaking of the economics-related back and forth between my colleagues here, a new report out by RAND last week compiles a series of papers presented at a November 2006 conference on U.S. economic competitiveness (yes, that took awhile). It’s a pretty meaty compilation with lots of interesting good-news, bad-news data and insights from leading economists, engineers, and other scientists.

What caught my attention, though, was this news article that picked up on a particular stat in the lengthy report. We’re told that “overseas talent” is helping to augment our science and engineering workforce since “70 percent of [foreign born students] elect to remain in the U.S. after completing their degrees.” Phoebe Leboy, President of the Association for Women in Science, is apparently concerned that most immigrants “do not serve as good role models for our students” since children better identify with those who appear to come from a similar background. It got me thinking about the research on the question of teacher-student race and its relationship to student achievement, which has fascinated many a scholar. In short, the findings are mixed (yes, I know, we get tired of hearing that). Still, I prefer to think that a scientist’s or engineer’s strong content knowledge and passion for the subject matter is far more important in inspiring and challenging would-be scientists and engineers than is his skin color, accent, and/or nationality.

If high-quality teachers don’t want to work in schools where students of one race predominate (a claim that seems dubious, for the reasons Mike points out), this fact remains: students at lots of schools are going to be of the same race. Alas, housing patterns make it so. The nation should’ve learned from its busing experiences—which hastened k-12’s racial separation—that socially engineered school assignments don’t work. Forcing students to attend class across town, whether it encourages more highly qualified teachers or not, is no longer a realistic option for school districts. We waste time acting as if it is.

That’s one implication of her recent post about my take on the “resegregation” of Seattle’s schools. I lauded Seattle’s superintendent and school board for prioritizing student achievement over concerns about the racial make-up of their classes. Eduwonkette responds:

Here are my two cents on this false choice: Even if you only care about student achievement, racial composition is important. Put simply, it’s more difficult to attract and retain high-quality teachers in schools that are racially isolated. There are oodles of papers on this topic, but here is a good one. Mike has more to say about this point, so I’ll let him take it from here...

I do indeed! That’s an interesting rebuttal from Eduwonkette, though wouldn’t high-flying schools such as KIPP, the Amistad Academy, etc. contradict that argument? Don’t they show that great teachers will teach at racially isolated schools that are well-run? Isn’t it possible that teachers just don’t want to teach at dysfunctional schools, which unfortunately is how many racially isolated schools could be described?

This is a causation/correlation quandary. If racially isolated schools tend to be located in high-crime areas, or led by weak principals, or lacking in parental support, then good teachers might avoid them for those legitimate reasons. Or is Eduwonkette suggesting that teachers are simply racist, and would avoid racially isolated schools in safe neighborhoods, with great principals, and lots of parental involvement? Maybe I’m naively optimistic (I grew up in the Midwest, after all), but I don’t want to believe that we live in that kind of country.

* Whereas I’m only concerned that too many are obese.

The Seattle Times is into the third day of its series on the “resegregation” of the Seattle Public Schools. (See Sunday’s, yesterday’s, and today’s articles.) The first quote in the first article makes the paper’s angle clear:

“We like to think of ourselves as these enlightened, liberal folks,” says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. “But the fact is our schools aren’t the way that people really think they are.”

So what’s the way Seattle’s schools are? They are, by and large, racially imbalanced, with percentages of minority children that tend to be much higher or much lower than the district average. As goes Seattle, so go most of our schools—because people still tend to live in racially imbalanced communities. (Though Monday’s story illustrates that housing patterns don’t explain everything.) The Times obviously wants its readers to be outraged about this. Thus the use of the highly charged (and highly inaccurate) word, “resegregation.”

But guess what? Many people in Seattle—particularly those running its schools—don’t appear outraged. According to the paper, they are “resigned.”

Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson hopes Seattle residents see the value of living and going to school with people from a wide mix of backgrounds. But she says she can’t change where people live. And as much as she values racial diversity, she values high-quality schools more.

A quality education, she says, “trumps diversity.”

School Board Chairwoman Cheryl Chow puts it more bluntly: “It’s not my job to desegregate the city,” she said. “We serve the kids that come to our doors.”

And what about school board member Martin-Morris, whose quote kicked off the series?

“This is probably heresy and I’ll probably get in trouble for this,” says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. As long as a school’s academic program is strong, he says, “I’m not so much worried about the ethnic makeup of a building.”

That’s right: “enlightened, liberal” Seattle is coming to see that a quality education “trumps diversity.” This is good news. No, this is great news. This might be a turning point. After arguing about race for forty years, many of which saw an expansion of the achievement gap between white and black students, even the left-left coast is agreeing that student performance is more important than the racial make-up of a classroom.

While we’d all feel better if our schools reflected the racial diversity of our nation, minority students would surely feel better if they actually got a good education that prepared them for college and the world of work. That view appears to have gone mainstream—like a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. Hooray!

Yesterday’s Sunday Times (UK) featured a piece on New York City’s student pay-for-performance plan, spearheaded by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. The article also explores more generally the latest efforts to solve the crises facing America’s black community, contrasting two main approaches with some expressive terminology:

The education initiative has pushed Fryer to the forefront of a national debate that has previously owed more to emotional political bias than scientific rigour. On Fryer’s left is the black “ghettocracy”, the angry old guard of black liberation. Led by rabble-rousing preachers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jack-son, it tends to blame everything on racism or white malice.

On his right is the “Afristocracy”, the conservative black elite led by Bill Cosby, one of America’s most popular comedians, who has repeatedly taken black youths to task for being stupid, ill-mannered slackers. “They think they’re hip,” Cosby once said. “They can’t read, they can’t write, they are laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere.”

Interesting, as always, to see how we’re viewed by our cousins across the pond.

Photo by Fran Collin from The American.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist/political cartoonist David Horsey comments on the now-disbanded Office of Equity, Race, and Learning Support of Seattle Public Schools.

The director of the office, Caprice Hollins, gained notoriety for a variety of offensive acts. Most noted was the page she put up on the district’s Web site that asserted Seattle’s public schools bought into the belief that such things as planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English were examples of cultural racism.

Horsey has a follow-up blog post here.

We know that the best schools “sweat the small stuff”; they do not overlook untucked shirts, they do not permit poor posture, they do not deign to hold different students to different standards of discipline.

Instead of following that model, schools in Anne Arundel County are taking the opposite approach—i.e., “training staff in how to work with people of different backgrounds....” Consider these alarming sentences:

Teachers and administrators may misinterpret the body language and occasional confrontational behavior that some African-Americans learn in their neighborhoods and use at school as a way of standing up for themselves, veteran educators say. They will often back down if they’re made to feel safe.

Ella White Campbell reinforced such sentiments by telling the Baltimore Sun, “Being rude means one thing to you and another thing to me.”

Of course, being rude generally means one thing to employers, which is that he who is rude is not hired. Anne Arundel County wants to lower its rates of suspension of black pupils—rates that, according to the NAACP, indicate “discriminatory treatment.” The true discrimination, the soft-bigotry of low-expectations bit, is Anne Arundel’s new position of pretending that black children should be held to different standards of discipline than should non-black children.

One wonders: To laugh or to cry?

Break down test-score data by the ethnicity of Asian students?

The Sacramento Bee’s editorial page weighs in on the racial remix controversy at Will C. Wood Middle School, coming to the defense of the school’s principal:

A Bee analysis found that 80 schools across the state changed racial designations for students in ways that allowed the schools to meet federal standards. And why not? Race is an artificial social construct, not a science. When a child is half black and half white or half Asian or part Indian or part Latino—what exactly is she?

And:

The situation at Will C. Wood highlights a conundrum posed by No Child Left Behind. While the performance of racial, ethnic and socio-economic categories of students can reveal much about how well a school is meeting its needs, those categories by themselves reveal little. A struggling student is a struggling student, whether he or she is white, or black, or Latino, or Asian.

It sounds like Liam’s arguments might be having an impact on the Left Coast. Perhaps it’s time to move past NCLB’s obsession with race, after all.

It’s too bad that Lucky Liam is spending a few days being a bon vivant in Montreal because it would have been fun to see his reaction to this story out of California. The Sacramento Bee reported yesterday on a school that would have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind were it not for the fancy footwork of its principal:

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong said. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

“Go white”? No doubt Liam would say something witty like, “When you divvy up the American people by race, eventually you divvy up individual Americans by race.” And he would have explained, as he did in a National Review Online piece, that he is one of the only education analysts in the country who deeply dislikes NCLB’s policy of disaggregating test score data by race. That would have sparked a debate about the merits of said policy that would have gone something like this:

Me: Touché, Liam, but let us not overreact to the actions of a single misguided principal. Just like we don’t abandon testing because a handful of teachers cheat on the test, neither should we abandon holding schools accountable for the performance of all of their groups of students just because Mr. Wong divvied kids up by race. The real travesty is that the U.S. Department of Education allows California (and Florida) to deem schools as A-OK even if 99 African-American or Hispanic or low-income students in a school fail the state test.

Liam: But Mr. Wong was not alone. The Sac Bee found 80 schools in California that “got out of trouble” with NCLB by changing students’ racial identities. Surely this is happening in the other 49 states too. And it’s hardening America’s obsession with race. If a school is going to contact parents about their child, shouldn’t it be about something other than the color of their skin? WWMLKD?

Me: Martin Luther King would have staged a protest outside Mr. Wong’s school. He wouldn’t have backed away from the most important civil rights law to come along in a generation.

This would have continued all day, no doubt. As I said, it’s too bad Liam’s in Montreal.

Evidently Reverend Jeremiah Wright made some controversial statements about education and race last night. Over at The Corner, Byron York asks Checker for his take on the whole thing.

The obvious rejoinder to Mike’s post is that when people cluster in “communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics,” they also cluster among people of the same race and socioeconomic status.

The impulse to seek out those similar to oneself isn’t new, but today’s society offers people many more methods by which to act on it. Marketers know this. Chris Anderson writes in his book The Long Tail, “If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.” Successful companies are producing less of more, that is, to appeal to the clustered masses.

Some will say the drawbacks of racially or socioeconomically homogenous classrooms, classrooms that Mike rightly calls undesirable, far outweigh the benefits of schools where pupils parents agree on “what good education looks like.” Maybe. But as long as adults like to send their kids to close-to-home schools (they do), and as long as they live near others like them (they do), individual schools will be racially and socioeconomically uniform.

The Thernstroms (among others) convincingly document that this isn’t as bad as it seems. The alternatives, which all depend on busing, are far worse, in no small part because they shift schools’ focuses away from learning. Clustered schools, by contrast, could focus even more attention on learning. Mike writes, “As geographic sorting occurs, neighborhood public schools will have the same ability to customize themselves to fit the values of the local community.”

Is this the future of public schools: a confederation of classrooms customized to fit the preferences of their customers? If so, where does this fit in with standardized testing (not to mention Fordham’s dreams of national standards and tests)?

Principal Jana Fields knows that No Child Left Behind looks at school test-score data by subgroup. She knows that the scores of black students are evaluated separately from those of white students, that the scores of Asian students and those of Hispanic students are gathered in their own, specific cluster.

So, she thought, I should gather in their own specific cluster all the actual black students at my school and pump them up by telling them that their exam grades are worse than those of their white peers.

According to the Sacramento Bee, some parents disagreed:

“To me that was outright blatant discrimination by race,” said Marie Townsend, an African American mother whose daughter Mikalah attended the meeting. “If you have a group of students that are struggling, don’t you think all the whites and Asians and Hispanics who are struggling would benefit from that assembly?”

Yes, one would think so. But in our race-obsessed schools, it seems that any type of racial segregation is okay, as long as it’s done with the kid’s interests in mind.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s time our public schools got past race.