Do Black Minds Matter?

Anyone who really wants to improve the lives of American blacks should pay special heed to the views of Daniel Henninger. He points out the flagrantly obvious-- namely, that the greatest damage to black lives and especially black minds is imposed by inner city public schools. The worst performing students in the worst schools in the country consign children to lives of quiet, and at times not-so-quiet desperation.

The solution, as we and many others have often noted, lies in the expansion of charter schools. In New York City inner city children who attend Success Academies perform exceptionally well in academic competition. Their scores are comparable to those of children in the toniest suburban schools.

Of course, the Democratic Party, being in vassalage to the teachers’ unions, are opposed to charter schools. They will do everything in their power to shut them down, and thus to ruin the lives of more and more inner city black children. 

Henninger frames the issue correctly:

We’ve spent two months talking about almost nothing but the policing of inner-city neighborhoods. But for my money, no public issue more clearly defines the overlooked stakes in this election than the future of educational achievement in the big urban school systems spread across the U.S.

The black lives most at risk are the young men and women living in the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods, attending the worst-performing public schools in the U.S. 

The Biden platform has aimed at ridding the nation of charter schools:

If Joe Biden wins on the basis of his current policy course, those young black lives will have next to no chance of their schools improving in the next four years. This version of the Democratic Party laid out its schools road map in the recent Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, which proposes both to reinforce the public-school status quo and suppress its competition from charter schools and private schools.

Of public charters, the document says, “we have learned that there must be guardrails on them if they are to receive federal funds.” That’s a terrible abuse of “guardrails.” They don’t want guardrails for charters. They want roadblocks.

It does not quite say so outright, but it has included a poison pill. Namely, the charter schools will be judged in relation to the performance of children in a district’s other schools:

This is the killer proposal: “Require that federal funding for charter schools in any district be conditioned on a district’s review of the financial and academic impact of a new charter school or a charter school that wants to expand on that district or neighborhood. The Education Department would have the ability to deny federal funding for charter(s) if the district’s analysis shows that it is (1) financially distressed or (2) the charter would systematically under-serve the neediest students.”

Henninger concludes:

This means appointees in a Biden Education Department could—and would—come up with myriad bureaucratic reasons to withhold federal funds and weaken the existing network of charters. They can’t kill charters outright, but they can turn the oxygen counterclockwise.

In truth, the Obama-Biden administration had already mandated a rule that makes education nearly impossible in those schools. It chose to make it far more difficult to suspend or expel unruly students, thus undermining classroom discipline. Obviously, the bureaucrats instituted the rule because it noticed that more black children were being suspended and expelled. Thus, in order to have better looking statistics, it damaged every child's prospects.