The Other Black Lives That Matter
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In my web-reading this week, I stumbled across two statistics that made me sit up straight. The first came from a devastating story last September about my home city’s public schools. I had just watched a slick new video from DC Public Schools about their new “equity” push, which aims to go “beyond students’ academics” and “call out inequities.” The video is full of vague-sounding pabulum — they never define what they mean by “equity,” for example, apart from invoking Ibram X Kendi’s term “antiracism” — but the message is very clear: “equity” is now the central focus of the school district. And it’s a bright new day!
Now check out the data on how the DC Public School system is faring. A key metric is what they call “proficiency rates” — a test of whether the kids are passing the essentials of reading and math at every stage of their education. Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys , it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.
This is not a function of money. In the most recent federal analysis : DC spends far more per student — $30,000 a year — than any other state, double the amount in many states across the country.
Let’s put it this way: if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned. But since it’s a public school system, it can avoid this catastrophic failure by emphasizing “equity”!
Call this the woke dodge. As they fail to educate kids in the very basics, they brandish a shiny object over there — “Diversity! Equity! Inclusion! ” — to distract us. Or they claim that these scores are caused by “white supremacy” or “systemic racism.” Or they argue that now, they are educating “the whole child.” From the DCPS video: “The racial equity lens is a critical component of ‘whole child’ for us because being a whole child means thinking about all of your identities, but certainly the racial identity is a gap in what we’re discussing as a country.” Anything but do the basic job of teaching math and reading as they are supposed to do.
The truth is: they obviously can’t teach those subjects successfully. I’m sure many are good teachers doing their best, and some manage to rescue some of these kids, who often face terrible trauma in their homes and neighborhoods. But the data overall are damning. Imagine spending $30K a year on a student, any kid, in any country, and after 12 years, he still can’t spell or do basic math. It must be really hard to pull that off. And as a reward, you get a shitload of money from the city and the feds to keep it up. Criticize them? You’re a “white supremacist.”
Then there’s the other stat that blew my mind — on the post-BLM surge in murders of African-Americans, including many children. The rise in homicide has cooled off somewhat, as Robert Verbruggen notes . But check this out:
Between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 periods, the black homicide rate went up by about 40 percent and the white one by 15 percent — already a glaring disparity. But since the black homicide rate started out so much higher than the white one, this translated to an increase of just 0.4 per 100,000 for whites and 9.7 per 100,000 for blacks — nearly 25 times as large. The increase in the black homicide rate was greater than the total homicide rate for the nation as a whole.
Read that last sentence again.
Far too many African-Americans live under the threat of constant, murderous violence. In DC in 2022, nine percent of all homicides were of minors — higher than the previous year, and an obvious factor preventing them from learning, and causing trauma among their peers. According to DCPS, 76 percent of students have witnessed a violent act, and 70 percent have been attacked by members of their own family.
Can you imagine what would be done if this were true for white kids? Can you imagine what outcry there would be if nine percent of murders were of white children? Or if these killings were happening across the District and not concentrated in primarily black sections? There would be instant demands for immediate security, much more funding for the police, all sorts of programs to keep children safe. But because these kids are black and effectively segregated by geography, we carry on as if there is nothing much to see here.
A case in point: what is the response of the DC Council to this sort of crisis? Roughly what the completely broken school system has done in the face of its catastrophic failure: distract the public by getting even woker , by lowering sentences for violent crimes, and giving alleged murderers more tools to dodge or delay justice. The woke dodge again.
Worse, the DC Council is clearly sending a signal not only that we are not in a crisis, but that, if anything, we need to be more lenient on criminals, and let the kids fare as best they can. Because “equity.” And for good measure, the woke dismiss or try to cancel anyone who dares to make these obvious points. Or they accuse us of bad faith. Or even being racists because we care about this stuff. (You are racist if you don’t care about this, but also racist if you do — see how that works?) Or that the color of our skin means we have no standing to talk or write about this at all.
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2 very alarming stats:
Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys , it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.
Between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 periods, the black homicide rate went up by about 40 percent and the white one by 15 percent — already a glaring disparity. But since the black homicide rate started out so much higher than the white one, this translated to an increase of just 0.4 per 100,000 for whites and 9.7 per 100,000 for blacks — nearly 25 times as large. The increase in the black homicide rate was greater than the total homicide rate for the nation as a whole.
Emphasizing DEI will surely teach kids to read and stop violence by putting criminals on the street. .
Cultural revolutions take a heavy toll on both the lives ruined as well as the lives lost.
DCPS Becoming:
Last year a review of standardized testing in DCPS found: