By Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street
Journal
PHOTO:
MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mayor de Blasio may identify as a progressive champion of
the underprivileged, but the reality is that he’s blocking the surest path to
the middle class by relegating the city’s poor to inferior schools.
To say that many liberal elites have all but given up on
educating low-income minorities might seem like an overstatement. But when you
consider the state of public education in our inner cities, and the priorities
of those in charge, it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.
After Labor Day, New York City’s 1.1 million public
school students will return to the classroom. The majority of them can’t do
basic reading or math, according to state standardized test results released
last week. And the numbers get even more depressing when broken down by race
and ethnicity.
Black and Hispanic students make up 67% of the system, while
whites and Asians are about 15% and 16%, respectively. Only 28% of black
students passed the math exam, versus 33% of Hispanics, 67% of whites and 74%
of Asians. On the English exam, the passage rates were 68% for Asians, 67% for
whites, 37% for Hispanics and 35% for blacks.
Sadly, these racial gaps in academic achievement have
persisted for decades, and they are a main source of racial inequality in
America. Want to help someone avoid poverty or addiction or incarceration? An
education goes a long way.
The irony is that the same social-justice advocates
who obsess over inequality also spurn reforms, such as public charter schools,
that help close black-white differences in learning. “City charter schools, now
teaching roughly 10% of the city’s student population, markedly outperformed
traditional public schools again” on the state tests, reported the New York
Post. Fifty-seven percent of charter-school test takers passed the state
English exam, and 63% passed the math portion.
Moreover, the highest scores in the state, for the third
year in a row, came from Success Academy, a New York City-based charter-school
network, where the passage rates for math and English were an astounding 99%
and 90%, respectively. Even more impressive is that these charter students are
mostly low-income blacks and Hispanics, not middle-class Asians and whites.
If the primary goal were student achievement, Democratic
politicians like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio would allow these successful
school models to proliferate. But the mayor is far more interested in placating
his political benefactors, the powerful teachers unions, which oppose charter
schools because they don’t control them.
To the National Education Association,
the American Federation of Teachers and their thousands of state and local
affiliates, public education is more about jobs than about kids. Reforms that
marginalize or circumvent union members are rejected, regardless of whether
they benefit students. Mr. de Blasio may identify as a progressive champion of
the underprivileged, but that’s lip service. The reality is that he’s blocking
the surest path to the middle class for the city’s poor by relegating them to
inferior schools.
Opponents of school reform insist that a lack of funding
is a major problem, but education spending has increased for decades without
significant improvements in outcomes. Per pupil spending in places like
Baltimore and Washington is among the highest in the nation, but you’d never
know that based on test scores. In New York’s poorer neighborhoods, school
spending is significantly higher than the citywide average, which in turn is
well above the national average.
The claim that racism explains the learning gap also
can’t withstand scrutiny, but that hasn’t stopped liberals from making school
desegregation a priority. In fact, some of the best public schools in the
country are high-performing charter schools with large percentages of black and
brown students. That doesn’t mean segregated schools are desirable or that they
lead to academic success, but at the very least it does suggest that black
children don’t need white classmates before they can learn how to multiply
fractions or diagram sentences.
Nevertheless, the left’s ideological obsession with
racial balance in the classroom continues. Mr. de Blasio is currently
preoccupied with trying to phase out gifted-and-talented programs because they
are populated with too many white and Asian students. This is an extension of
his beef with the city’s elite public high schools, which admit kids based on a
standardized exam.
It’s worth noting that even the New York Times has
questioned the mayor’s reasoning and the possible fallout. “He risks alienating
tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families whose children are
enrolled in the gifted programs and selective schools,” the paper wrote this
week. “If a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be
even more difficult to achieve integration.”
You’d think that the main objective of the inequality-obsessed
would be to help more minorities meet high academic standards, but Mr. de
Blasio and his fellow progressives would rather eliminate the standards
altogether. I’d call that giving up on minority kids. What would you call it?