It’s tough to decide what’s more
shocking about a complaint
a few
special interest groups have brought against Louisiana education agencies about
public schools in New Orleans: the utter lack of logic and fact in the
complaint, the crazy assumptions it makes, its separation from reality, or the
hatred that it exudes. Regardless, it sadly puts ideology before children.
Filed with the U.S. Department of
Justice by the Advancement Project,
a group that believes racism is
institutionalized into American government and society, and Journey for Justice Alliance, a smaller
group focusing on preserving schools in majority black neighborhoods that
contains three local organizations, the Coalition for Community Schools, the Conscious
Concerned Citizens Controlling Community, and Vietnamese American Young Leaders
of New Orleans, and also affiliated with a number of teacher unions, it claims
violations under Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act. Specifically, it
asserts that the pattern of school closures and dispersions of those students
occur in areas of disproportionate racial minority composition of residents,
which then results, it claims, with them being sent disproportionately to worse
schools than those whites more likely are to attend. It seeks relief by not
having closed five schools, likely to be converted into charter schools, that
almost entirely have black students and are the last ones in the Recovery
School District not charter schools, and a general moratorium on renewing
charter schools.
It then proceeds in large part to
moot these claims by its own words. First, note that within the Orleans Parish
School District and RSD overlaid in the area, essentially there are no school attendance
zones. It’s open admission to any school in the parish to which a student
qualifies. This obviates immediately the claims not only that neighborhood
schools are valuable in their own sake – because with open admissions there
aren’t really any – but that any kind of discrimination in fact is going on by
closing these schools in their traditional forms, because if reopened as
charter schools they remain available as a choice for parents and that it was parental
choice that was creating the distributions by race at schools.
This point to the real objection that
the plaintiffs have – it’s not the closing of neighborhood schools, it’s the
closing of them as traditional schools. That is, these groups hate charter
schools, and attitude that weeps throughout the complaint, such as in the
assertion that now all but a handful of schools in Orleans Parish – and as of
next year, every RSD school will be – are charter schools has created a
situation where “too many of the charter and privately-managed schools that
have multiplied as replacements for our beloved neighborhood schools are test
prep mills that promote prison-like environments, and seem to be geared at
keeping young people of color controlled, undereducated, and dehumanized.” Or,
in the inimical words of one of the complaint’s authors, closing and chartering
schools "is the new Jim Crow,"
Which leads one to conclude that
the plaintiffs believe superior education is not a worthwhile goal for minority
children to achieve. After all, academic research has
demonstrated that the charter school system in Orleans has produced
improved returns beyond what traditional schools were doing for those students
from closed traditional schools. Instead, they would rather keep these students
in these schools, because they were traditionally run in a majority black
neighborhood, than allow them either to attend that school as a charter, or to
transfer to another charter school, either of which likely is to produce a
superior educational experience, according to the data.
The complaint then really goes
off the rails when it acknowledges the failing status of the five closed
schools, thereby meaning these children only could have an opportunity for
greater progress in either attending these as charter schools or transferring
elsewhere. But this process, the group charges, is discriminatory because the
OneApp system of allocating students in the open enrollment process, which
depends upon family desires (what school and whether to send sibling to school together)
and seats available produces distributions where the most majority black
schools are usually the worst performers and those that are least majority
black (keep in mind that in Orleans 86 percent of students are black) often are
the best performers.
As they note, in part this is
because OneApp does not include 10 schools that have some kinds of admission
standards, of which these have much higher proportions of non-black students
than the OneApp schools. Because the additional requirements makes these
schools unable to participate in OneApp, it becomes an instrument of
discrimination, according to the plaintiffs. Further, four of these schools
have entrance assessments, two have slight neighborhood preferences in majority-white
areas of Orleans, and two give preference to certain university faculty
children, all of which the plaintiffs allege “disproportionately exclude
[black] students,” aggravated by, they claim, a lack of dissemination of
knowledge about the separate schools and additional requirements.
So, following this tortured
logic, the charter nature of the system forces large-majority, if not entirely,
black poorly-performing traditional schools to close/convert, which to date now
means all of them, into a system where black students disproportionately end up
in poorer-performing charter schools, even if these are better schools than the
ones closed/converted, compared to white students, while the few traditional
schools left have criteria alleged to be race-based (which must be assumed if
it is considered a problem than they have proportionately fewer black students,
despite the differential admissions criteria used, as the plaintiffs argue),
all of which connotes illegal discrimination. This implies the entire concept
of charter schools, the OneApp process, and the practice of allowed excluded
schools from it on the basis of aptitude, neighborhood, and parental employment
with knowledge about them said to deliberately withheld, are racially
discriminatory. Or, as the plaintiffs allege, “the racial disparity caused by
RSD's policy of school closures, authorized by [the Board of Elementary and
Secondary Education], and implemented by [the Louisiana Department of
Education], provides circumstantial evidence of intentional discrimination.”
The stupidity writ large by these
sentiments begins with the data. If in fact the entire system was designed to
discriminate, there would not be significant outliers. Among the top-ranked
schools in the parish, while almost all have lower proportions of black students,
one has a higher proportion whit no white students. If a system designed
deliberately to discriminate were in place, there could be no exceptions. The
same is true in that while of the lower performing schools almost all have
black student proportions at a higher level than the system average, two have
them at lower levels and with a higher level than the white student average.
But the real poverty of intellect
behind these charges comes in the half-baked conceptualizations of the meaning
of the disparate numbers and their presumed causes. The argument is that making
everything within OneApp a charter school, it sets up a mechanism designed to
maximizing shunting of black children to worse performers and of non-blacks to
better performers, and with the non-OneApp schools discriminatory requirements they
amplify that mechanism.
Yet this entirely reverses the
actual cause and effect, a mistake hinted at by reviewing the performance data by
race above. Contrary to the complaint’s argument, performance does not
determine racial distribution at a school, it is racial distribution that determines school performance. This, of
course, is anathema to the plaintiffs’ conceptualization, because it
invalidates the notion that, if prejudice is not causing the relationship to be
in one direction, it is government policy that is the main determinant that makes
it go in the other direction.
More specifically, for five
decades policy has been that poorer black student performance in schools is
solved by using the traditional government-monopoly model – which placed power
in the hands of bureaucrats, unions, and ideologues wedded to the idea of
maximally empowering government and expanding its size and reach over
individuals – by pumping more money into the system (which also happened to
increase the power and wealth of these elites) in order to overcome the
vestiges of state-sponsored discrimination, even as these actual mechanisms of discrimination
had been wiped out of the law books. Yet the achievement gap continues,
pointing to the fact that this policy does not work, and it does not work because,
as identified by scholars beginning with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward
Banfield, poverty, supposedly an indicator of racism and strongly correlated
with academic achievement, is much more validly an indicator of a complex of
attitudes that undervalues education and related others that do not focus on
achievement for the future, but on present consumption.
Thus, even if a partial
contributor to adoption of the “present orientation” as the prevalent attitude
within the black community was institutionalized racism, eliminating that by
itself does not alter that orientation to a “future orientation” more often
evident in the white community. Policy must create incentives to evolve out of
that, which often means the exact opposite of spending huge sums through
institutions that have flourished by their ability to capture these sums, because
this strategy only enables these to place more emphasis on institutional
maintenance than on intended institutional mission.
This is why the charter movement
has been successful in New Orleans, as much because its violation of the
government-one-size-fits-all model that matches better resources to student need
with fewer impediments as its ability to uproot institutionalized structures
that catered more to establishment interests, special interests, and political ideologues
than to children’s needs. And this precisely is what the plaintiffs object to,
for they represent interests that benefitted from the previous alignment.
So they concoct this fiction of
racism in education delivery in New Orleans by mistakenly reversing the
causation – it is cultural attitudes largely within the black community that
cause lower performing schools, not a system “trapping” black children in lower
performing schools – and, more specifically in doing so, set up a fantastic and
disturbing conceptualization of blacks in America. For in their declarations of
the non-OneApp school admission exceptions being illegitimately discriminatory,
they must make two horrendous assumptions. First, they are saying that, by their
very nature, higher standards, neighborhood preference, and job preference
discriminate against black children. Which, secondly, leads to the horrific
attitude, given the lack of employment or housing discrimination in America,
that black children are intellectually
less capable, black families don’t aspire to live in “better” neighborhoods,
and that blacks have less innate ability to work in higher education.
It is lamentable that the
plaintiffs carry such a negative set of attitudes about an entire segment of
the American population that shares a racial characteristic. Only if you
believe significant differences exist between blacks and others both in
intellect and attitudes, and that for some reason attitudes are immutable, can
their assertion of the “discriminatory” nature of the non-OneApp schools additional
criteria make any sense.
Understand that, as the
plaintiffs readily admit, that the circumstantial statistical evidence makes
sense only when there is theory behind it to explain it. For this kind of
claim, to interpret the evidence the way they do, there must be demonstrated,
not merely asserted, intent of discrimination – a preposterous notion in this
case given the confirmed salutary impact the charter system has had on black
(and all) students, the neutrality of the results of OneApp, and the
reasonableness of the admission standards for the non-OneApp schools in that their
objectives reasonably have no racial content.
Hopefully, the bizarre ideas
behind the complaint should be more than enough to dismiss it, although
regrettably Attorney General Eric Holder has previously evinced
sympathy for these kind of views on similar matters. Otherwise, children
will suffer to fulfill the psychological needs of some narrow-minded adults.
1 comment:
The word 'blacks' should be changed to 'children from a low socioeconomic status' in this post. Do the charter schools in NO offer buses? The new ones in Lafayette don't...
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