Equity Fails At Every Level

Yesterday's post was semi-incoherent, so I wanted to take another run at the idea so I could make my position on the matter completely incoherent.

The situation is this. At Charlottesville High School, they place a lot of value on the idea of equity. That is, when grouped by race, student cohorts should achieve roughly the same results. That's been an abject failure.

Above the students, at the teacher level, the teachers walked off the job because of student violence and disobedience.

Above the teachers, the principal has resigned.

UPDATE Monday, Nov. 20: City Schools Superintendent Royal Gurley has selected an interim principal to lead Charlottesville High School while the district conducts a search for a permanent replacement.

Kenneth Leatherwood will begin “immediately following the Thanksgiving Break,” Gurley said in a letter to the school district community Monday. Leatherwood replaces outgoing principal Rashaad Pitt, who announced he was resigning earlier this month.

To bring order, they've summoned a group completely outside of the control of the education industry. The cops.

Nearly 30 Charlottesville High School teachers reportedly called out sick Friday. The calls, a coordinated effort to draw attention to the violence, came one day after police were called to the school to address two back-to-back fights.

Some of the kids are eager to escape the violence.

Shamia Hopkins, a mother of a Charlottesville sophomore, finds the situation "disheartening and a little irritating." She told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) her daughter wants to transfer schools to escape the ongoing violence.

"She just feels like no one hears, no one listens, there's not really any real consequences going on," Hopkins told CITC. "I don't want her to feel like she has to change her life because of things that are going on."

Hopkins also has a child in middle school who is afraid to one day attend Charlottesville. The mother of two says she shares her older daughter's stress, telling CITC she frequently wonders if she is "going to get a phone call today" while at work.

The violence includes large-scale brawls. 

The fighting in particular has been a cause for concern this entire calendar year, with multiple moments of violence caught on camera and circulated online. One large brawl that broke out on Thursday afternoon resulted in multiple smaller skirmishes and general chaos across school grounds. That chaos included an 18-year-old intruder who does not attend CHS gaining access to the building for the sole purpose of joining the fights; a CHS student let the 18-year-old in. Charlottesville police had to be called to help staff restore order; it took hours.

I found a deliberately blurred video of one of the brawls on the Interweb Tubes, but it wasn't worth sharing. Imagine 30+ kids going at it in the school library.

So Team Equity has failed the students, failed the teachers, had the principal resign and terrorized the families. Will anyone on Team Faculty Lounge in our universities adjust their way of thinking? Maybe. Maybe not.

For all of their faults, Davis, Cleaver, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpenproletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers—the lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work, except as symbolic justification for their abstractions.

This is where the critical race theorists reach the final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty professional-class aestheticism, designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation.

The disconnect was never with the black lumpenproletariat or any proles at all. The disconnect is with reality itself. Life is not the way the CRT folks describe it. It's not made up of the oppressors and the oppressed, neatly grouped by easily-identifiable markers. It's made of individuals who make their own choices, influence by the culture. That culture includes political leaders, teachers and the entertainment industry.

The basis for our culture, currently dominated by the progressives, is failing at all levels.

Bonus Data Point From California

Here's a good article on what's going on in Fresno, CA.

“You've got something like a reading rate of, a grade level reading rate of 17%,” Teresi pointed out, and that drops to just 9% in students performing at grade level in math, according to the same state diagnostic test.

Bullard High School Head football coach Don Arax says it’s much worse than that.

“I think the public would be shocked if there was a running video of the things going on on these campuses and even more shocked if they saw the way these problems were dealt with.”

From academics, to fights on school campuses, to teachers afraid even for their own safety. After four years on the FUSD school board former trustee Terry Slatic says, there's one thing at the heart of all of this.

“The culture of retribution and the hostile work environment at Fresno Unified School District is awe-inspiringly bad.”

Team Faculty Lounge is clinging to their CRT with an iron fist.