BrianGarst.com

One of the problems with government run education is that, without any built-in, systematic mechanism for holding schools accountable, all kinds of half-baked, feel-good policies get propped up by educrats. It is rare, however, to find policies so blatantly racist as those currently being promoted in San Francisco.

…A new grading system will expose schools – even the popular, high-scoring ones – that are failing to address the institutional racial inequities within their walls.

“The issues we’re dealing with are capital D Democracy issues,” said Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice, and the plan’s architect.

The question, however, is how to solve those deep-rooted societal problems that are playing out in schools. So far, no urban district has bridged the achievement gap or created schools of equal quality for children regardless of their race or income.

The solution, according to the superintendent’s plan, starts with a top-down acknowledgment that the schools are contributing to the inequities in society, Smith said.

Each school will be judged by how well it “serves each and every student based on that school’s ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes,” according to the plan.

Deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice? Barf.

The real objective here is not what it seems. Educating children is not this educrat’s goal; advancing an agenda is. Notice where he contends that the first step is to admit that education is institutionally racist. This is a classic ploy to get one radical assumption accepted by default by advancing a completely different proposal. Once that proposition is accepted, they are then free to engage in all manner of social engineering, all in the name of correcting this “historic racism.”

Furthermore, this policy is inherently racist. What has individual performance to do with the larger averages of some identity group if there is no causal relationship? Unless we are to believe that different races are more or less capable of performing than other racial groups, it makes no sense to focus on something as irrelevant as race. All students should be held to high standards, not some to lower standards than others because they belong to a certain race. This policy, like so much of identity politics, will dice people up into little groups and exacerbate racial distinctions for no reason. So much for the color-blind dream.