Evanston, Ill., is a town with many problems. Crime is way up in the leafy Chicago suburb, taxes are going up too, the city’s “slavery reparations” program disappointingly failed to cure African-American poverty, and worst of all it remains home to Northwestern University, forever the resentful and less prestigious rival to the glorious University of Chicago. It’s a tough burden for any small town to carry, and that’s all before I tell you how progressively Democratic they vote (their representative in Congress is the laughable Jan Schakowsky). But test scores in public schools have been falling precipitously as well, making the plight of hardscrabble Evanstonians — many of whom escaped the city hoping for a better education in the pricey suburbs — even harder.
It’s unsurprising that Evanston is experiencing the same struggles with underperforming schoolchildren — primarily black and Latino children from low-income households — besetting most other public schools across the country. (The State of New York recently floated the shameful idea of making its Regents Exams, passage of which is mandatory for a high-school diploma, optional instead.) How to respond? Perhaps a rigorous reform is in order, not only of the curriculum but of the teachers tasked with delivering that curriculum to the kids. Maybe they could try bold solutions like banning all cellphones at school, as the Washington Post editorial board advocated Saturday in a rare fit of good sense. At the very least, perhaps inflicting more “Colorism Privilege Walks” on the white public-school students would lower the overall curve through demoralization, even if it doesn’t improve anyone’s scores.
But of course, the Evanston School Board, having already once approved the last-named option, has decided instead to raise the stakes: According to the Wall Street Journal, the board members have thought it through carefully and — in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion — are going to give segregation a shot again. Don’t worry, though — this time it’ll be good. These are not your old, nasty, Fifties “Jim Crow” segregated classes, mind you. No, these are refined, sensitively modern “Affinity Classes,” an idea first tried in the San Francisco Bay Area’s public schools (the true hallmark of a quality educational idea). They are purely voluntary and “designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class.” As one administrator puts it, “A lot of times within our education system, black students are expected to conform to a white standard. . . . In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in blackness.”
Set aside, for a moment, your moral revulsion at school DEI administrators who blithely seek to undo the last 70 years of racial and educational progress in the United States. Instead, have fun pondering what comes next. Are only black and Latinos allowed to have “affinity” classes? Are Asians permitted to have theirs? When they inevitably are, are South Asians once again going to just get rolled into the “Asian” group, or do they get their own devoted “affinity” environment to learn in, too? The Evanston/Skokie School District proudly runs a land acknowledgment on its website; will these cruel settler-colonialists acknowledge the right of First Nations people to have “affinity” classes as well? (Imagine how many desperate white male college applicants would try to join.) Will Jews be allowed to have an “affinity” class? Actually, given that it’s Evanston, and not Skokie, maybe the better question to ask is: Will the Jews be forced to have an “affinity” class?
Summon that moral revulsion once again, for it is impossible to overemphasize how the idea of voluntary resegregration — ventured as an idea of the progressive left, no less— reflects the wreckage of our once-shared public civic culture. Inclusion may be voluntary; exclusion is mandatory, by definition, for those of the “wrong” race. If pursued with the identitarian zeal of today’s modern class of DEI administrators, as it would no doubt be, it would inevitably turn into a gentler form of Jim Crow, with performance differences to match. (As a matter of intellectual hygiene, it is never a good idea to find yourself in the ideological company of Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes.)
Part of the reason public education exists — the law requires you to give your child an education of some sort for a reason, after all — is to socialize young children and adolescents into the world they’ll be entering. The existence of “affinity” classes only makes sense in a world where we want to teach black and Latino students that the primary people they should regard as their peers are members of their own ethnic group. (And make no mistake: For true DEI believers, that is entirely the point — the formation and perpetuation of “racial consciousness” for political ends.) As a secondary matter it also reflects yet another pathetic stab at trying something, anything, to solve the otherwise intractable problem of large percentages of wildly underperforming minority students. That Evanston’s school board has now twisted itself into a racist pretzel trying to justify the New Jim Crow shows you the lengths people will go to when they’re otherwise out of ideas and are just pushing whatever buttons are both available and — in a way that shocks the American conscience — permitted by progressive ideology.
Evanston, Ill., Adopts Exciting New Solution to Underperforming Minority Schoolchildren: Jim Crow
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27.11.2023
Evanston, Ill., is a town with many problems. Crime is way up in the leafy Chicago suburb, taxes are going up too, the city’s “slavery reparations” program disappointingly failed to cure African-American poverty, and worst of all it remains home to Northwestern University, forever the resentful and less prestigious rival to the glorious University of Chicago. It’s a tough burden for any small town to carry, and that’s all before I tell you how progressively Democratic they vote (their representative in Congress is the laughable Jan Schakowsky). But test scores in public schools have been falling precipitously as well, making the plight of hardscrabble Evanstonians — many of whom escaped the city hoping for a better education in the pricey suburbs — even harder.
It’s unsurprising that Evanston is experiencing the same struggles with underperforming schoolchildren — primarily black and Latino children from low-income households — besetting most other public schools across the country. (The State of New York recently floated the shameful idea of making its Regents Exams, passage of which is mandatory for a high-school diploma, optional instead.) How to respond? Perhaps a rigorous reform is in order, not only of the curriculum but of the teachers tasked with delivering that curriculum to the kids. Maybe they could try bold solutions like banning all........
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