Where Structural Racism Really Lies

Folks on the left insist that our cultural institutions are shot full of what they call structural or systemic racism. Usually the evidence that's adduced in support of this claim is pretty thin, but occasionally it becomes apparent that the claims of structural racism may have some merit. Ironically, though, the structural racism, if it exists, is often in institutions run by the progressive left, as William McGurn argues in an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal.

McGurn writes:

[I]f ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big city public-school systems. By any objective measure, these schools consistently fail to provide their African-American students with the basic education they will need to get ahead.

But instead of addressing achievement head on, the progressive answer is to funnel yet more money into the existing failed structure, eliminate tests that expose its failure, and impose race-based preferences to make up for it.

If tests show a big disparity in achievement between whites and blacks, the progressive solution is to get rid of the tests. If too few African American students are taking AP and other advanced courses, the progressive solution is to get rid of the advanced courses. It sounds like something right out of George Orwell's Animal Farm. McGurn continues,

Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth graders in their care are proficient in either math or reading.

It isn’t even close. In a number of these school districts, proficiency rates for black eighth graders are down in the single digits (see Detroit’s 4% for math and 5% for reading, or Milwaukee’s 5% for math and 7% for reading). Most are in the low teens.

San Francisco and Seattle aren’t part of the Trial Urban District Assessment districts reporting their scores. But the other four are, and their scores for black achievement are as bad as the rest. Now imagine what this means in real-life terms for the majority of black students who are not proficient in these skills. For most, it means consignment to a place on the margins of the American Dream.

Embarrassed by the way our big city public school systems are failing black children, progressives answer not by making it easier for these kids to get into schools where black children are achieving, whether this be charter or parochial schools.

Instead, they focus on getting rid of the embarrassment by getting rid of the achievement tests that expose it, doubling down on race preferences and trying to hamstring the schools that show black children can and do learn in the right environment.

McGurn's right to suggest that that one solution to these dismal statistics is to make it possible for students to get out of those schools where education is next to impossible and attend schools of their choosing. Unfortunately, progressives, dominated as they are by the teachers' unions, oppose school choice.

Actually, though, I'm not convinced that weak administrators and bad teachers are the whole problem. They're certainly a big part of the problem, but many of the students who attend failing schools also come from families where the father is absent, and the children are being raised by a single mother who's trying to do the best for her kids while also working and taking care of the house.

It's very difficult for a single mother in a poor neighborhood to instill discipline in children, especially boys, even when she desperately wants to do so, and without discipline boys won't succeed in school unless they're geniuses.

School choice is a necessary but not sufficient remedy for black academic failure. It's likely to help only those students who have a supportive family structure. Any long-term solution must involve keeping families intact and having a consistent positive male role model in young boys' lives. Of course, progressives are also opposed to any serious push for strong two-parent families in African American communities. For them, the idea of strong two-parent families smacks too much of dreaded patriarchy.

Yet when there's a racial achievement gap in an institution and all the common-sense solutions are opposed by those who work in that institution or are in the back pocket of those who do, then it seems that racism might well be suspected as a root problem in that institution.

McGurn finishes with a discussion of the upcoming Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in which Harvard’s use of race-based admissions is being challenged.

Harvard’s defense is that it can’t achieve diversity without some race preferences. But few will say aloud the ugly implication of this argument: If black students had to compete on merit alone, they would largely disappear from our top universities. Didn’t someone once say something about the soft bigotry of low expectations?

Why are racial preferences necessary? Why aren't African Americans able to compete in numbers commensurate with their share of the population? Perhaps, as McGurn suggests, it's because our big city public schools, run by progressives, are in fact structurally, even if inadvertently, racist, and because progressives oppose doing anything that could possibly be expected to help.