The Feds Have Been the Main Source of Racial Bigotry in Classrooms
“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” proclaimed Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees unit representing more than a thousand federal Education Department employees fired by the Trump administration. The New York Times frets that the layoffs could devastate the agency that “tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.”
But ever since it was created by President Jimmy Carter, the Education Department has done far worse than “pull the wool” over Americans’ eyes. Federal mandates and bureaucratic meddling have helped mentally blight millions of children.
More than 150 years ago, abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” But federal education policymakers have prevented legions of kids from reaching that road to freedom.
No modern American president did more than Barack Obama to canonize bigoted standards in federal education policy. President Obama championed subsidies for public schools so that “the federal government can play a leading role in encouraging the… high standards we need.” But, as part of its convoluted plans to reduce the achievement gap, the Obama administration cajoled most states into setting lower academic goals for blacks and Hispanics. From 2009 onwards, the feds rubber-stamped official plans under which white and Asian students were expected to perform far better than black and Hispanic students. (I bashed the discriminatory policy in USA Today in 2014).
The feds bankrolled the District of Columbia’s plan to boost the percentage of white students who passed reading tests from 88 percent to 94 percent while the percentage of black students who passed rose from 41 percent to 71 percent. At DC’s Wilson High School, the goal was for 67 percent of black students and 95 percent of white students to pass math tests by 2017. Cynical Washingtonians joked that Wilson High had a two-track system, and its graduates went either to Yale or to jail.
The federal Education Department approved Tennessee’s plan to raise the passing rate for English III courses for white students from 45.6 percent to 65.4 percent between 2011 and 2018 while the passing rate for black students leaped from 17.6 percent to 47.6 percent. The feds approved Minnesota’s plan
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