Remember when “civil rights violation” meant being refused admission/employment or blocked from the polling place or hit upside the head for exercising your right to peaceably assemble, just because you’re black?
Those days seem quaint now. If anything negative happens to you (preferred minorities only) in 2010, as a consequence of your performance, behavior, and choices, it’s a civil rights violation. Denied a job because you scored too low on an employment test? Civil rights violation. Expelled from school because you’re an habitually bad boy who starts fights, despite expulsion warnings? Civil rights violation.
The existence of racial disparities means somebody, somewhere, is doing a whole lot of discriminating. Move over, Selma. There’s a new billy club-swinging hick sheriff in town, and his name is…disparate impact.
“Education Secretary Arne Duncan, like many liberals, seems afflicted by Sixties Nostalgia Syndrome, a longing for the high drama and moral clarity of the civil rights era,” columnist George Will writes in the Washington Post. “Speaking this month in Alabama at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march, Duncan vowed to unleash on public schools legions of lawyers wielding Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They supposedly will rectify what he considers civil rights violations, such as too many white students in high school Advanced Placement classes.”
Will recounts Duncan’s remarks about disparities between the races in schools and how the Obama administration plans to rectify this insidious inequity. No longer is the movement about ensuring liberty for individuals, but demanding equal outcomes for groups.
“No policy denies minority or low-income students ‘access’ to AP classes,” Will writes. “The pertinent lesson of the 1960s is the futility of casting today’s problems of social class, as Duncan does, in the anachronistic categories of the civil rights era. In 1966, the seismic Coleman Report concluded: ‘Schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account.” (Emphasis added.) … Plainly put, the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance — qualities of the families from which the students come. Subsequent research suggests that about 90 percent of the differences among the proficiency of schools can be explained by five factors: days absent from school, hours spent watching television, pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading matter in the home — and the presence of two parents in the home.”
Since the government can’t force people to marry before having children or maintain an intact family for the benefit of the children, it falls back on the so-called civil rights violation tactic. If a preferred minority is not performing well in school, even if family structure plays a role in his under-performance, the government drags in 1960s-era civil rights comparisons and invokes images of violent resistance against black Americans fighting to be treated as first-class citizens.
At the very least, the children will learn a big word: hyperbole.
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I am writing in response to George F. Will’s column titled “Don’t Blame Discrimination for AP Woes”. George Will states that “Government can do next to nothing about family structure, which is why it is pointless for Duncan, (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan), to suggest that “access” is why “the door to college still does not swing open evenly for everyone”.
George Will is incorrect in stating that the issue of “access” is pointless. Obviously, “access” to a college-prep curriculum is based on economics. Certain public school’s curriculum and early emphasis on standardized test scores could adversely affect many students, who may eventually become interested in AP. Students who apply for the AP program in Indian River County are supposed to have high FCAT scores. FCAT basically determines “access” to a challenging curriculum and funding. If elementary students score well, they are placed in challenging Honors and Advanced classes in Middle school with regular homework. Some high scoring elementary school students are offered “access” to extracurricular academic games.
Classes, such as Calculus, are challenging by the time students reach high school. “Access” to these classes is basically predetermined. AP success in Calculus, starts in elementary and middle school. Students in Honors and Advanced middle school math classes have homework and summer workbooks. These students will have have a foundation necessary for success in AP classes. Many middle school students do not have access to at home textbooks, regular homework or summer workbooks and therefore are not being prepared for AP classes. In fact, students whose parents have a strong math background are more likely to succeed in Advanced and Honors math classes at the middle and high school level, so schools in more affluent areas will have higher test scores, more funding and better access to AP programs.
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