Flash! Academic Achievement Is Racist

Alas. The little red schoolhouse, and the not so little ones, were supposed to get another boost from the federal government which just felt it didn't have enough control over national curricula. President Obama wants everyone to go to Columbia and Harvard Law, so he cobbled-together a $4.5 billion program called "Race To The Top."

Obama and his Indoctrination (oops, Education) Secretary should have known it's not nice to inject race into the title of any bill, even if human race has nothing to do with it (sort of like "black" in "black hole"). If they had called it "Equal Failure In The Schools," it probably wouldn't have drawn the attention of the NAACP, Rainbow/Push Coalition and the National Urban League, among others. But since the program is designed solely to reward some nebulous federal standard of success in academics rather than provide funds based solely on race or ethnic background, the usual suspects are in high dudgeon.

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the race and color-based organizations have been suspicious of any federal program that is niggardly in providing huge sums of money for "disadvantaged youths" and emphasizes instead accomplishment over "racial empowerment." In that bill, Senator Ted Kennedy managed to put in lots of goodies for special programs based almost entirely on race and ethnic background, but not enough to suit the big race-based organizations. George Bush enabled the bill by once again misplacing his veto pen.

But now "those people," apparently including their former messiah in the White House, have added insult to injury by throwing more federal funds at, horrors, incentives for competitiveness in education, a healthy dollop of funding for charter schools, and the closure or takeover of failing schools. Several of the spokespeople for the big organizations have essentially called Obama a race-traitor, even though that could at best be only a half-truth. This is a major problem since it pits him and his administration against major funders of his perpetual campaign, and not just the race-based organizations. The teachers unions don't much like it either, because they know that success among black, ethnic, and white students depends in large part on good teachers. That is a classification sorely lacking among public school union teachers. Please note that I do not include teachers who would rather not join the union, but have no choice.

The whole flap is comically ironic. The goal of progressive education since time immemorial has been to use poor (mostly black and/or foreign) neighborhoods for social engineering and untested methods of pulling the disadvantaged out of ignorance and poverty. Obama has billed himself and his gang of Democratic lefties as Progressives. Yet now he proposes to raise student accomplishment rather than reward failure and racial happenstance by funding programs based almost solely on academic success. Has anybody told him that if he's not careful, he's going to sound like the conservative educators who have been proposing this sort of thing, unsuccessfully, for years. Next thing you know, he'll start quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.--correctly.

Using the words of the earlier fund-fest, Obama's critics in the race industry say that the proposed bill stacks the deck against the "majority of low-income and minority students who will be left behind." They haven't quite yet found a way to explain how additional incentives for academic success will negate all the billions of dollars that will still be spent to provide a dubious safety-net for poor students in failing schools.

President Obama spoke before the National Urban League recently and couldn't figure out why his speech was not received with the usual euphoria. "Let me tell you, what's not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across the country is the status quo. That's what's not working." Something tells me that Obama did not get script approval for that statement from his buddy, Weather Underground Education Professor William Ayers.

Obama spent most of his post-academic career raising and obtaining funds for all kinds of ridiculous and expensive programs in the ghettoes and barrios, but education wasn't among those goals. So naturally, he chose the former superintendent of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan, to be Secretary of Education. He praised Duncan for raising Chicago school standardized test scores by 29%. What he didn't mention is that it would be nearly impossible to lower Chicago's achievement on test scores. For instance, after his seven year tenure as superintendent, Duncan's 11th graders failed to meet minimum standards to the tune of 70% of students taking the tests. Well, I guess that's better than 80% failure. And then, of course, there's the matter of raising scores by lowering the standards of the tests.

I don't know if someone slipped something into the administration's evening merlot, or whether it's just a simple case of mass hysteria, but even Duncan is now praising charter schools. But like the race-based organizations, I think I smell a rat as well. While he was Chicago's superintendent of public instruction, he spent most of his time going to fund-raisers and political get-togethers put on by the Chicago political elite. Duncan carefully categorized these powerhouses by both income and political clout, and amazingly, the children of those on the lists were fast-tracked out of the worst public schools and into the best public and private schools. Sure, some of those rewarded were black, but for Progressives looking out for the deprived and oppressed, the fast-tracking didn't do any good for indigents, the powerless, or poor minorities.

The "status quo" of which Obama speaks is almost entirely attributable to liberals, progressives and social engineers--people much like himself. The concept of being rewarded for what you've done rather than what you are is not ordinarily in their philosophy. So it's no shock that the race-based organizations and special pleaders are upset with Obama on this issue. What is a little surprising is that Obama seems to be as tone-deaf to his own base as he is to the will of the majority of Americans. By the time he leaves office, he may have set the record for the number of political groups of all persuasions that he has alienated.