Black kids are suffering when schools use critical race theory to teach
The bestselling young adult book “Dear Martin,” previously required reading in Haywood County N.C., opens with a scene where a half-Latino half-White police officer obviously hearkening to George Zimmerman accosts a young Black boy named Justyce. The police officer is portrayed as a menace and Justyce is portrayed as an innocent victim of his rage and racism.
The bestselling young adult book throws nearly every single racial incident, act of violence, and biased insubordination at the poor boy. The entire book is about one thing and one thing only: race; specifically, how America is still a racist country to Black kids.
Yet this book was named the William C. Morris Book Award winner for best Young Adult literature. At one School Board meeting in Haywood County, a father gets up and explains that this book isn’t suitable for children, citing the numerous expletives and artless details of the protagonist’s girlfriend. That didn’t stop the local paper and parents from questioning whether the father was really a racist.
The father should push back on the viability of the themes of racial abuse, even if he risks being canceled for it. Think about the intensity of a book like “Dear Martin” and how it would affect young, impressionable minority children.
In effect, the book trains Black kids to fear White people. A police officer shoots Justyce’s Black friend. A White smart aleck verbally bullies Justyce. Justyce’s own mother warns against dating White women.
It may be true that books like “Dear Martin” simply reflect in literary form the received wisdom of Black families in the United States. If so, then that received wisdom needs to change in light of the reality that Black Americans no longer face similar levels of racism as they did in the ’50s and ’60s.
Black Americans are shot by the police at lower rates than Whites when you account for their rates of altercation. 60% of Black Americans believe they are in a better financial condition than their parents.
Black Americans are more college-educated than they’ve ever been. Our “Black History” courses and our readings that reflect “Black History,” however, still primarily endorse the concept that America is racist to Black people.
When Black Americans are put through a gauntlet of teachings that emphasize such a depressive worldview, they become more depressed and cynical about their own condition.
A Birkbeck College, London poll of Black Americans found that when Black Americans read a passage by leading Critical Race Theory author Ta-Nehisi Coates that says, “In America, it’s natural to destroy he Black body,” the percentage of Black people who say they are in control of their lives falls from 83% down to 68%.
That is not to say that there are not sobering issues with many primarily Black regions of America. The average PISA scores, an international testing metric, among White Americans is 521, good for third-highest in the world among countries.
But the average PISA scores for Black Americans is 436, comparable to developing countries like Egypt and Mexico. Even schools in similarly high-income counties that are primarily populated by Black Americans tend to do less well than schools with more mixed races.
Prince George County, MD, a majority-Black county, has a $91,124 median household income, which is about same for the state, but only 25% of its students test at grade level in reading – and 10% test at grade level in math.
The reactionary response to these statistics would be to say that Black American educational success is hopeless. But some of our country’s all-Black charter schools, such as Sisulu-Walker in Harlem, have closed reading gaps between Black and White kids by 2/3rds or more.
Some of several keys at these schools is to emphasize phonics education at an early age (a policy popular with many advocates of closing the racial achievement gap) and to cultivate strong discipline policies that give real consequences for unruly behavior.
Former president Barack Obama’s Title VI guidance written in 2010 made it much harder for school principals to do that by requiring “racial equity” in disciplinary measures – meaning that Black kids had to be disciplined at the same rates as Whites despite greater than average violent altercations.
Black Americans are more college-educated than they’ve ever been. Our “Black History” courses and our readings that reflect “Black History,” however, still primarily endorse the concept that America is racist to Black people.
As a result, violent incidents in Virginia schools have risen 45% between 2011 and 2016 – with complaints about Black kids accounting for 62% of them.
The integration of critical race theory, the idea that America is a systemically racist country, into our schools is making things worse.
The University of North Carolina’s Department of Allied Health Sciences blasted lectures as “systematically shortchang[ing] underrepresented minority students,” ironically casting rude stereotypes on Black students as being unable to handle the lecture format. In the name of anti-racism, they create climates ever more indulgent of mediocrity for Black students.
Under a CRT lens, advocates have even blasted the way we teach mathematics as racist against Black kids. But they can’t explain why Asian kids, another minority, would do so well at math in a supposedly racist country.
CRT of course invalidates hard work and study, as a Khan Academy study shows that Black kids who do 20 hours of Khan Academy practice tests are able to improve their corresponding SAT scores even more than White kids. The problem is getting these kids to do 20 hours of Khan Academy practice tests – which few non-Asian minorities do.
Overall, in the name of solving “racism,” schools in America have become lax at teaching what really works and are instead teaching everything that doesn’t. Furthermore, they are hitting Black kids with devastating narratives of White hatred towards them, setting them up for spiteful futures with low opportunity.
Let’s have some real straight talk here. The problem facing Black people in America today is not because of America’s “unconscious bias” towards Black kids. It is due to the systematic failures of our CRT-informed education system to push Black kids to grow and succeed.
