Time-Warped Goals
The NAACP on education.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity.
November 20, 2001 1:20 p.m.

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.