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 ast
week, the Education Department of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People issued a 40-page report, titled "NAACP
Call for Action in Education." At the same time, NAACP
president and CEO Kweisi Mfume launched what his press release terms
"an unprecedented national campaign to end racial disparities
in the nation's public schools and institutions of higher education."
The first sentence
in the report has a typo in it.
Even before
that, though, the executive summary, in typical, time-warped NAACP
fashion, stresses, "Too many children have inherited the disadvantages
of Jim Crow segregation, and even of slavery …." For those
nostalgic for five-year plans, the NAACP proposes one, or, rather,
50 of them: "Five-Year Educational Equity Partnership Plans
in every state," designed "to cut the racial achievement
gap by at least 50% over the next five years." But the report
can also be as modern as this month's wonk-babble, urging "strong
community partnerships" and creating new verbs, as in "educators
must partner with community agents." And what progressive white
paper could fail to devote a whole section to "Closing the
Digital Divide"?
But even those
parts of the report with more promising headings are almost always
disappointing. One section is devoted to "Improving Teacher
Quality." But standing next and equal to its "Teacher
Quality Recommendations" are the "Workforce Diversity
Recommendations," which are full of complaints about requirements
that teachers pass tests and insist that agencies "create a
plan with goals to assure training for an appropriate supply of
minority teachers."
Sorry, NAACP,
but you can't have it both ways. If you insist on quotas for members
of certain racial and ethnic groups — and that is what the
"goals" proposed by the NAACP inevitably become —
then you are not insisting on the best-qualified teachers.
And at what
level should the "goals" be set? Page 6 of the report
clearly indicates that the NAACP wants the teacher population to
mirror the student population. There are several problems with this.
For starters, the Supreme Court has rejected this kind of "goal"
on at least two occasions. Furthermore, this would mean that school
districts with no black, Asian, Latino, or American Indian students
should not be hiring black, Asian, Latino, or American Indian teachers
— an odd position for the NAACP to be taking. And it would
mean that school districts that were all or heavily minority —
which describes many inner-city systems — would be barred from
hiring non-minority teachers, disqualifying a lot of very qualified
applicants and thwarting efforts to improve teacher quality.
The report
attacks tests for students at even greater length than tests for
teachers. It claims that the use of standardized tests is "potentially
unconstitutional," which is ridiculous. The only way a test
could be unconstitutional would be if it were being deliberately
designed and used to flunk kids of a particular race, and not even
the NAACP makes this claim. To the contrary: The reason for this
testing is to improve the educational opportunities provided to
all children, and in particular minority children.
The section
in the NAACP's report on "Increasing Parental Involvement"
is unremarkable in its assertion that "Most experts agree that
parent involvement can be crucial to children's success in school."
But note that that's "parent," singular, and therein lies
the problem. The remarkable thing about the NAACP's discussion is
that it manages never once to mention the reason that so many black
children don't get the support at home that's needed: Nearly 70
percent of all African-American children now are born out of wedlock,
over triple the rate for non-Hispanic whites.
Professor James
Q. Wilson has noted that children in one-parent families are twice
as likely to drop out of school as those in two-parent homes. (The
Department of Education last week reported that the high-school
graduation rate for non-Hispanic whites last year was 92 percent,
versus 84 percent for blacks and 64 percent for Hispanics.) Wilson
also cites a federal-government study finding that, for whites,
blacks, and Hispanics at every income level except the very highest,
children raised in single-parent homes were more likely to be suspended
from school. And illegitimacy correlates with other, non-school-related
pathologies, like emotional problems, unemployment, and crime.
Next, the report
complains that a disproportionate number of black students are disciplined
and placed in special education programs. But statistical disparity
does not equal discrimination. Indeed, with regard to the latter
programs, it is hard to figure out exactly what the NAACP wants,
since it also complains, "Despite the egregious disparities
in identification for special education, many minority students
who do have disabilities do not receive adequate services."
With respect
to discipline, however, there is little doubt what the NAACP wants,
and it's what it always wants: quotas. Except that here it wants
quotas to limit black numbers rather than guarantee them. The report
includes a graph labeled "Racial Disparities Have Grown Dramatically
with Increased Suspensions," showing that the black-white gap
in suspensions jumped between 1972-73 and 1988-89, and then again
between 1988-89 and 1998-99. But it seems very unlikely that America
is becoming more and more racist, and all too plausible that these
numbers reflect the breakdown of the black family (see above) and
coarsening of much of black culture.
In addition, one suspects that the "proliferation of 'zero
tolerance' and other harsh disciplinary policies" which the
NAACP complains about has a very simple explanation. When discipline
was meted out on a case-by-case basis, schools found themselves
dragged into court and accused of, among other things, racial discrimination.
The safer course was being able to point to an across-the-board
rule. Nor is the NAACP's report last week likely to reassure school
principals that their days as defendants are over. The report declares
that the model discipline codes it wants "must be consistent
with due process." It also demands that data on suspensions
and expulsions "be disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Substantial
disparities should trigger investigation and possible intervention
by state or federal civil rights authorities."
The NAACP also
wants to continue to use litigation leverage by keeping school districts
under forced-busing orders eternally. Its report criticizes school
districts, parents, and children who seek to end such court orders.
The last part
of the NAACP report is devoted to higher education. Unlike the organization
of the same name a generation ago, the NAACP now urges colleges
and universities to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity
in recruitment, admissions, and awarding scholarships and other
financial aid to students, and in hiring and promoting faculty.
Naturally, the report opposes the use of standardized tests inasmuch
as this has a disparate impact on black and, to a lesser extent,
Latino students. Of course, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People's stance here will hurt Asian students, but the
left has long viewed these students as one "colored people"
whose cause it cares not to "advance."
Throughout
the report, the NAACP heaps blame on standardized tests, on which
African American students frequently lag, but in doing so it is
simply killing the messenger who brings bad news. There are three
basic reasons why African American students underperform in school:
(1) Seven in ten are born out of wedlock, and so will inevitably
get less parental support and supervision (this is a particular
problem for boys); (2) too many black children view studying hard
as "acting white," as John McWhorter (in his book Losing
the Race) and others have discussed; and (3) inner-city
public schools, disproportionately attended by blacks and Latinos,
are failing because they are not required to compete through choice
and charter-school programs.
The NAACP report
addresses none of these issues. Instead it wants educators to pretend
that African American children are more academically competitive
than they really are by giving them racial preferences or by dumbing
down and otherwise tinkering with educational standards.
Not everything
in the NAACP's report is wrongheaded, but even where it is not wrong
it is likely to miss the real points. By offering false solutions
and ignoring the important problems, the NAACP helps no one, least
of all the children whom it claims to champion.
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