Discriminations

Jack O’Connell, California Superintendent of Public Instruction, recently convened an Achievement Gap Summit to address gaps that are, in fact, quite dramatic. According to a state snapshot:

Student Proficiency in English-Language Arts by Subgroup
• Hispanic 27.4%
• African American 29.0%
• White 60.3%
• Asian 64.3%
• Filipino 58.0%

Student Proficiency in Math by Subgroup
• Hispanic 29.8%
• African American 24.9%
• White 53.0%
• Asian 66.9%
• Filipino 53.0%

In some ways even more dramatic, the gap is as bad — in some areas even worse — when the comparisons are limited to students in the same socio-economic circumstances:

Percent Proficient Among Socio-economically Disadvantaged Students in English-Language Arts by Subgroup
• Hispanic 25.3%
• African American 22.9%
• White 39.2%
• Asian 45.8%
• Filipino 47.5%

Percent Proficient Among Socio-economically Disadvantaged Students in Math by Subgroup
• Hispanic 28.1%
• African American 21.6%
• White 38.3%
• Asian 53.2%
• Filipino 48.9%

Percent of Students Proficient in English-Language Arts who are NOT Socio-economically Disadvantaged, by Subgroup
• Hispanic 39.9%
• African American 37.9%
• White 65.7%
• Asian 76.1%
• Filipino 62.3%

Percent of Students Proficient in Math who are NOT Socio-economically Disadvantaged, by Subgroup
• Hispanic 35.5%
• African American 29.9%
• White 56.6%
• Asian 75.5%
• Filipino 54.6%

The problem, in short, is real. Unfortunately, neither Superintendent O’Connell’s analysis nor his proposed solutions are.

Like most professional school people, Supt. O’Connell is no doubt a good liberal. Therefore, according to this account of his “Summit” in the San Francisco Chronicle,

[l]ike many educators, O’Connell assumed the culprit was poverty. Then he noticed an even wider ethnic disparity among students who were not poor....

The realization was a jolt: Being black or Latino — not poor — was what the low-scorers had in common. And it changed everything.

Based on this summary, I’d be more tempted to say it deranged everything.

O’Connell now believes that widespread cultural ignorance within the California school system is responsible for the poor academic performance of many black and Latino students in school.

He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it’s good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said.

Do they learn at church that it’s a good idea to behave that way in school? Do young Hispanics learn the same thing ... at Communion? Are teachers on the public payroll supposed to tell black kids that what they learn in church is wrong? Are low math scores (and the math scores of non-poor blacks are worse than those of poor whites and Asians) really the result of clapping in church? Could we please have a control group of, say, black Episcopalians, who presumably don’t clap and shout so much?

With an analysis as wacky as this, you can almost predict Supt. O’Connell’s response:

O’Connell and top educators in the California Department of Education have taken hours of racial sensitivity training, which O'Connell wants to extend to teachers statewide....

Wait. It gets worse.

Also on center stage will be Glenn Singleton, the coach O’Connell hired for the Education Department’s racial sensitivity classes. Singleton runs a San Francisco consulting firm called Pacific Educational Group and is the author of “Courageous Conversations about Race: a Strategy for Achieving Equity in Schools.”

Singleton has done quite well by preaching to various educational choirs that the achievement gap is caused by — you guessed it — racism. If he seems vaguely familiar, you have a good memory: I discussed him at some length over a year ago, here.

That discussion was based on a couple of columns by Vincent Carroll, editorial page editor of the Rocky Mountain News, who noticed a six-figure consulting contract Singleton was awarded by a Colorado school district. Carroll became alarmed when he discovered the racial claptrap on which Singleton has built his successful consulting career, writing in one of his columns:

“It is our belief that the most devastating factor contributing to the lowered achievement of students of color is institutionalized racism,” Singleton writes (with co-author Curtis Linton) in his recent book Courageous Conversations About Race. White teachers (and minority teachers co-opted into the white power structure) stymie black and Hispanic students because they fail to understand their cultures and how daily racial oppression affects their outlook. They also push a curriculum tooled for whites, and are ignorant of the special ways that blacks and Hispanics communicate.

“We will shine the light on racial dominance to uncover how Whiteness challenges the performance of students of color while shaping and reinforcing the racial perspective of White children,” Singleton and Linton promise.

“Special ways that blacks and Hispanics communicate”? Yes.

The program also promotes a worldview in which American society is relentlessly oppressive; in which individuals, even today, remain at the mercy of their racial origins; in which “white talk” is “verbal, impersonal, intellectual” and “task-oriented,” while “color commentary” is “nonverbal, personal, emotional” and “process-oriented.”

And what, I asked, are the “courageous conversations” Singleton proposes? As Carroll wrote, these are “conversation” that

follow a structured format in which participants examine and embrace specific premises, such as the ubiquity of white privilege and racism, and thus raise the consciousness of whites.

Participants must “come to recognize that race impacts every aspect of your life 100 percent of the time.” Meanwhile, “anger, guilt and shame are just a few of the emotions” whites should expect to experience “as they move toward greater understanding of Whiteness.”

Enlightened whites, in the authors’ description, speak in the chastened, cringing language of someone who has emerged from a re-education camp

If “Whiteness” is the culprit, why then do Asian kids do better? Surely you know the answer to that one: Asians do better because whites expect them to. Again from Carroll:

Singleton and Linton caution against any cultural explanation that can be construed as “asking the Black community to just ‘act White.’” So long as they insist on reducing an enormously complex matter to crude racial categories, however, it’s at least worth noting that there’s always the option of “acting Asian.” Is that offensive, too?

What is offensive is the state of California believing — and paying taxpayer money to support this belief — that the racial achievement gap in its schools can be cured by administering expensive doses of “sensitivity training” based on racial scapegoating.

UPDATE [16 Nov.]

In a Comment below, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute reminds me that this is the same Glenn Singleton who proved such an embarrassment to the Seattle school system, or should have.

In an excellent amicus brief he submitted to the Supreme Court in Parents Involved, the Seattle and Louisville racial school assignment case (which I discussed here), Bader described some of the utter tripe Singleton fed to the Seattle schools:

On its Equity and Race Relations web site, the Seattle School District, until June 2006, declared that “cultural racism” includes the following:

“emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology”;
“having a future time orientation” (planning ahead); and
“defining one form of English as standard.”

In addition, the web site declared that only whites can be racists, and that minorities cannot be racist towards each other. And it derided the concept of “equality” as an outmoded aspect of assimilation. (Assimilation in turn was disparaged as the “giving up” of one’s culture).

After these definitions became the subject of extensive media attention, the School District withdrew the page that contained them from its web site on June 1, alleging a need to “provide more context to readers” about “institutional racism.” In its place, the School District inserted a web page that criticizes the very idea of a “melting pot” and being “colorblind,” emphasizing that the district’s “intention is not . . . to continue unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.”

Now Bader has a new posting on the CEI blog discussing his important role in bringing to light Singleton’s contributions to the Seattle school mess, pointing out, among other things, that “4 of the 9 justices cited Seattle’s wacky, Singleton-influenced, definitions of racism in the course of their opinions,” and bringing the continuing Singleton scams up to date. Read it.