Systemic Racism Hiding in Plain Sight
– By Howard Sierer –
It’s the real civil rights issue of our time. Progressives who seem to find systemic racism wherever they turn are nonetheless leading supporters of powerful establishment organizations that have systematically and disastrously disadvantaged tens of millions of black Americans, all in plain sight.
Systemic racism is blatantly obvious in public education for minority and poor students in our inner cities. Even when these students emerge from public high schools with diplomas, they often lack even a junior high school level education.
As a result, they are penalized for life while most progressives look the other way. Left behind at the start, many if not most of the statistical measures progressives use to show blacks as victims of systemic racism – jobs, income, health, housing – can be traced directly to the inferior public school education they received.
This “systemic” or built-in racism has been foisted off on a large portion of the 20 million blacks who live in urban areas. The racist culprits: entrenched and way-too-powerful teachers unions that stand firmly in the way of solutions such as charter schools that have proven to provide a far superior education to that available in union-dominated, failing public schools.
Teachers unions dogmatically oppose charter schools because they claim they cherry-pick the best students and drain away funding from public schools. Both claims have been shown to be blatantly false and the unions know it. The real reason for union opposition: charter schools, most of which are non-union, threaten union monopoly control of teachers and the union dues they pay.
Urban elected officials – mayors, city councils and school boards – are the ones who could take action to correct this blatant racism. Instead, they often parrot teachers union opposition to charter schools. Why? Teachers unions are by far the largest donors to local politicians.
As one-time Speaker of the California Assembly Jesse Unruh famously said, “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” For too many local politicians, its money over kids.
The damage these unions and their left-wing, fellow-traveling legislators have done to minority children is immeasurable and unconscionable. Any claim by teachers unions about being “for the children” is simply empty and callous rhetoric.
Despite this systemic racism staring them in the face, progressives are largely silent on this issue. They are caught between their philosophical support for unions in general including teachers unions and the obvious and well-documented failures of union-run urban schools.
Charter schools are the well-tested and well-proven solution for minority kids in inner cities. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has tracked charter-school outcomes for over 15 years. Its most recent report documents the largest study ever conducted, covering over two million charter students in 29 states, New York City and Washington, D.C., compared with a control group in traditional public schools.
CREDO’s assessment is clear: Most charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” In reading and math, “charter schools provide their students with stronger learning when compared to the traditional public schools.”
The report shows that black and Hispanic students had some of the largest gains and that they “advance more than their [traditional public school] peers by large margins in math and reading.” Ditto for children in poverty.
Most indicative of systemic racism in urban public schools is what CREDO calls “gap-busting schools” that show black and Hispanic students succeeding as well as white peers. CREDO says this shows that “learning gaps between student groups are not structural or inevitable.”
In his 2020 book “Charter Schools and their Enemies,” Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote: “In a realm where educational failure has long been the norm—schools in low-income minority neighborhoods—this is success, a remarkable success. What is equally remarkable is how unwelcome this success has been in many places.”
I am quick to state that individual teachers are not the problem. My children went to busing-era integrated public schools and their teachers were not there for prestige, fame, or fortune. They were teaching because they cared about kids.
So why do charter schools do better? I believe it is their students or more especially their parents. Their parents valued education enough to jump through all the hoops and were lucky enough to land a spot for their child in one of the small number of inner city charter schools that teachers unions weren’t able to block.
In my experience as a parent, as a PTA member and as chairman of the Superintendent’s Advisory Council in a public school district with over 50,000 students, the best predictor of a child working up to his or her potential is parental involvement.
Supporting the charter school option for inner city kids and their parents is the best and possibly the only way to overcome the systemic racism practiced by big city teachers unions.
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