With determined effort, where once dozens of school districts in Louisiana several decades ago were under court orders and supervision to desegregate racially, by the end of 2028 every one might be relieved of this useless burden, blazing a trial for other states to follow.
When cases were brought against many of these districts 60 years or more ago, they were deserved. Segregation was rampant, even after a dozen years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education (emphasized by other such cases in the intervening years). It would take a couple of decades to ensure policies were in place to prevent discrimination in education provision in many of these instances, and when such changes were brought to the attention of the particular federal district court its judge would resolves these.
Yet others dragged on for decades after corrections had been made. Entering the second Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration, Louisiana still had a dozen systems under these orders. The cases continued on autopilot, long after the designated judges or even original plaintiffs had died. Fortunately, the Trump Administration has aimed to clear these cases from the books, seeing them as promoting race-based behavior in the absence of any proof of discriminatory intent.
Because today nobody seriously can argue, with any intellectual respectability and with a total inability to point to the specific actions and policies of governing authorities (meaning school boards) and the bureaucracies they command that denote racist intent, that there are a bunch of wild-eyed majority race (meaning white) policy-makers and administrators out there trying to keep minority (meaning black) folks’ children down. Except that, despite all of this, there are some – those that are part of the cottage industry that has grown up around the whole enterprise and wouldn’t have a reason to continue drawing resources to sustain itself without maintaining the rap that segregation still exists – who do insist otherwise.
They base this on the noxious notion that any inequality by race must by definition be caused by illegal discrimination; that is, outcome always defines intent. In their warped view, if there’s one school with a large majority white student body that appears to have better facilities, better test scores, and fewer disciplinary problems than a school at the same grade level in the district but which has a large majority black student body, racism must be the explanatory variable and thus a court must step in to impose policies that equalize results.
But that’s not how the real world works. Take the issue of facilities and differential local funding between the school doing better and the more problematic one. Actually, the more problematic school likely is getting much more in the way of federal dollars than the other because it’s almost certain the socioeconomic status of those students in general is significantly lower than those of the other school. However, those dollars go to operations, where the local dollars would go more towards infrastructure.
Yet throwing much more money at problematic schools for facilities makes little difference. What now is known as the “Kansas City Experiment” demonstrates that. Four decades ago, a court ordered the district encompassing that Missouri city to jack up spending, thus taxation, on schools to erase racial differences in achievement. Tons of money later, the needle barely had moved on achievement nor on diminished racial differences despite having schools more lavishly adorned with bucks than any others in the country – and segregation actually had increased.
It failed because money wasn’t the problem, which in reality was cultural in nature as a result of different attitudinal sets that largely define how economically successful people can be: poverty is not largely a result of a lack of money, but comes from a lack of certain attitudes about work, thrift, delayed gratification, and other related beliefs that bring success. And it’s not like this hasn’t been known for a good half-century but has been ignored because it defeats the political agenda of certain elites who want the world to think it is all about a rigged resource distribution.
Thus, where students come from environments that encourage living for today as opposed to saving, where respectful comportment is seen as stifling, and even where a belief in meritocracy is seen as oppressive, they will not feel as compelled to try to achieve, they will be more reluctant to discipline themselves or to receive corrective discipline, and they will be more likely to degrade their school’s physical environment. They also disproportionately will come from monetarily poorer environments and enjoy greater wealth redistribution from government, reducing the incentive to understand that more monetary resources come from adopting that certain set of optimal attitudes. Of course, those vested in the pretense that poverty is largely imposed by an external source will dismiss this (tellingly as) “blaming the victim.”
The real victims are the parents who find their oversight of their children’s education circumscribed due to rules imposed from the outside and administrators who have to waste a lot of time and resources in collecting data and writing reports in those instances where a district has – perhaps for decades – engaged in no intended discriminatory behavior. Worse, those forces invested in the status quo, who declare any significant differences in outcome along a race dimension as discriminatory regardless of the actual practices, want to keep it that way.
A return to sanity may be on the way. This month, state officials argued at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to exit St. Mary Parish schools from a consent decree. This actually was supposed to have happened over a half-a-century ago, but as often happens in these cases, matters fall by the wayside in the court system and ever since the district tried to get the court to dismiss, the plaintiffs, who didn’t object back then, have harassed to keep it open on the basis of statistical differences associated with race (or, more properly, socioeconomic status) but with no proof of genuine discrimination embedded in policy.
That’s because of the attempted redefinition by the political left of what constitutes discrimination, the same notion incorporated into diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology and underpinning attempts to force reapportionment of plenary bodies: numerical disparity in and of itself is enough to signal discrimination, born of an inherent racism emanating from the majority white population, that requires a race-based response to “fix.” The same is playing out in Concordia Parish, in asking that Court in an upcoming appeal to allow dismissal of the decree as both the district and U.S. Department of Justice assent and don’t want a lengthy trial, but even more compelling is St. Mary’s case because the district court in Concordia’s case hadn’t yet said it would dismiss the case in the past, although in Concordia’s case the original plaintiff and their representatives have become detached from it.
This effort is occurring only in Louisiana at this point. That’s as, even before Trump Administration announced its intentions, the state began to question why some cases still were on the books, and deserves applause for intensifying its efforts and continuing to see things through.
Where people live and families’ socioeconomic backgrounds today cause differences, not racism. Hopefully, the Court sees sense and outdated decrees such as these soon will fade into history.
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