Jackson Or Minneapolis?

It's a coin toss.

Dig this from PowerLine.

Having skipped school for a year or more courtesy of the teachers’ unions, a great many kids have never gone back, at least not on a consistent basis. Why should they, once not showing up got the official OK? Alpha News has the distressing statistics for Minnesota...

The number of Minnesota students who consistently attend school has dropped by 15% since 2019, according to state Department of Education data released last week...

So the state says you don’t have consistent attendance if you miss one day every two weeks, but of course, many of the kids we are talking about miss vastly more time than that.

Since 2019, the last time attendance data was released, the number of students with consistent attendance records has dropped from 85% to 69.8%, according to data for the 2021-22 school year.

So up to 30% of Minnesota’s kids are essentially part-time students. But it gets worse:

In Minneapolis, the number of students consistently attending school that year was just 45.8%.

Emphasis theirs. How's that working out and who's not going to school? Well, here are the test scores for Edison High and Roosevelt High in Minneapolis, both with about 1,000 kids.

It hardly matters which scores come from which school. This looks just like Jackson, Mississippi.

In short, there's a human capital problem at Jackson Water. One of the articles I read hinted at the state having to send in its own technicians to do the work that Jackson Water's people couldn't do. Once you strip away the red vs blue and black vs white garbage, you get down to the real problem. The employees at Jackson Water just aren't up to scratch.

Jackson Water is the answer to the question, "What are the long-term ramifications of destroying the traditional family?"

I then gave test scores from two large, public high schools. They were interchangeable with the ones from Minneapolis.

Those are your human capital feeders for water system mechanics. They come out of high school, go to a bit of trade school and get hired by the water district.

There's nothing there. You can't do anything with someone who is illiterate.

Dittos for the financial administrative staff. What are you going to do with an admin who can't understand math?

So now we have hard data that many kids aren't going to school at all. Like we needed it. 

I doubt anyone did a racial breakdown of the kids skipping class because EQUITY or something, but it's hardly necessary. You don't get into the bottom decile in test scores by accident.

Minneapolis, like Jackson, is governed by the far left. You couldn't hope to find people more devoted to anti-racism than them. Somehow, those crafty white supremacists still managed to sneak in and deliver the systemic racism right to the doors of their schools. 

Right now, I'm devouring Christopher Rufo's excellent book, America's Cultural Revolution. It starts by working through the history of the racial/social justice movement in America, beginning with Herbert Marcuse and then moving on to Angela Davis and the black radicals of the 1970s. I remember those days, but I thought Mr. Rufo was kind of wasting my time with the details and didn't see how the leftist nutbags of the 1960s and 70s had much of an impact today.

He's convinced me otherwise. The language we use today - systemic racism, cultural imperialism, etc - all comes from Angela Davis. The BLM leaders used Ms. Davis as a mentor and attribute much of their philosophy to her.

Angela turned to subverting the education system when the black militias failed. The movement that evolved from hers decided to conquer the universities instead of kill the cops on the streets. It's the same set of idiot ideas, it's just got a different delivery system.

And the results are the same. Illiteracy and destruction. Oof.