How To Think About Civil Rights (Continued)

Gary Blasi, a law professor at UCLA, paints a disturbing picture of Los Angeles schools in today’s Los Angeles Times:

… white fourth-graders are three times more likely than African American or Latino fourth-graders to be identified as “proficient” readers, while fully 70% of the district’s African American and Latino children cannot read at even a basic level. In math, the education gap in Los Angeles is even wider: White eighth-graders are 10 times more likely to be proficient in math than African American or Latino students, three-quarters of whom score at a “below basic” level. Compared to African American and Latino eighth-graders in all nine urban districts [around the country], Los Angeles students were dead last in math, with just 3% scoring at a proficient level.

Blasi’s warning is entirely correct:

The scores illuminate the lost opportunity for another generation of children. They also provide a stark warning about the future of California. California’s economy, as well as its civic institutions, depends on an educated citizenry. We simply cannot fail to educate a large percentage of our children and survive as a decent and economically viable society.

I believe he takes a wrong turn, however, in implying that the racial gap is entirely a civil rights problem. “[T]he most appalling thing about the [test] results,” he claims, “was their confirmation that, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, low-income African American and Latino students in the largest school district in California still receive radically inferior educations.”

In one sense the problem is even worse than Blasi indicates, for, as the Thernstroms and others have shown, the racial gap exists at all economic levels, not just for “low income” students. Nevertheless, even putting aside the fact that Brown dealt with neither “low income” nor “Latino” students, it stretches what Brown did mean to find in it a requirement that test scores be equal across all racial groups.

If everything were equal, those test scores would be equal too. But since everything is not equal, the operative question becomes: how far should the state go to equalize (which?) things? That is an important, even crucial, question, and one on which reasonable people can disagree. But I believe that it is an unhelpful distortion to view that question entirely as a question of civil rights.

In my view, the civil rights problem will be solved when people are not treated differently because of their race. On this view, the racial gap in academic achievement is a civil rights problem insofar as school districts short change or otherwise penalize certain schools because they are attended by minority students. My own hunch (although I will defer to others on this) is that this is no longer the problem in many places.

To say that the racial gap in academic achievement is not always a civil rights problem is not, however, to say that it is not a problem. Perhaps much more money should be spent on inner city schools. Perhaps much more money should be spent on vouchers or to encourage charter schools. There are, in short, a range of policy choices that should be debated, and I don’t believe that debate is advanced by wrapping one solution or another in the mantle of Brown.