After a school district’s students tested for placement in advanced courses, most of the children who qualified happened to be white. Upon seeing the results, the district’s superintendent made a decision that effectively punishes the qualifiers for outperforming students of color.
Boston Public Schools has not only adopted the dangerous equity movement, but it is also shaping its entire system around the idea that any program that doesn’t provide equal results across the board for all races is systemically racist and must be dismantled. Of course, the cost of such a policy is not lifting up struggling students but pulling down those who do well.
After testing for an annual selective program for advanced fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, BPS noticed a trend school officials consider “disturbing.” Despite nearly 80 percent of all Boston public schools students being Hispanic and black, more than 70 percent of students who scored high enough for the Advanced Work Classes were white and Asian, GBH reports.
Upon seeing the results, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius called for the suspension of the program, disallowing students to enroll in the advanced classes in the future. Cassellius admitted that the move was in response to the racial demographics that make up the program.
“There’s been a lot of inequities that have been brought to the light in the pandemic that we have to address,” Cassellius told GBH News. “There’s a lot of work we have to do in the district to be antiracist and have policies where all of our students have a fair shot at an equitable and excellent education.”
Immediately after her admission that the suspension of the program was due to equity was published, Cassellius backtracked, insisting that the decision had nothing to do with equity.
Left-leaning fact-checker websites quickly labeled the claim that the program was suspended due to the races of the qualifiers “mostly false.” They then buried direct quotes in which Cassellius cites “inequities” and the dedication to “antiracist” policies as motivators for the decision in order to create their narrative.
The websites also left out a flagrant admission of anti-white discrimination by a School Committee member, who alleged that this was the reason for their decision.
School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
“This is just not acceptable,” Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. “I’ve never heard these statistics before, and I’m very very disturbed by them.”
BPS confirmed that although it has suspended testing for placement in the advanced program, it will not prevent schools from doing so. BPS will not provide support for schools that wish to continue the testing, so schools must come up with their own method of testing and standards if they wish to continue the course.
The program was open to all students and was solely based on their test scores. The students who qualified were placed in a lottery, and the winners received invitations to apply for the program. Last school year, 453 students were invited, 143 applied, and 116 enrolled.
Cassellius knew that her admission of racial discrimination against white and Asian students would be panned. As such, she backpedaled. However, her acknowledgment of the district’s focus on equity instead of equality is proof enough of the discriminatory policies the district plans to implement.
Despite claiming to fight systemic racism and privilege, the same people are tearing down ostensibly fair and just institutions in an effort to impose their own racist systems. Disturbingly, they have become the racists of old that they so despise by oppressing certain identities under the guise of lifting others up.
Source: Tap Worthy Happenings
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