William McGurn

William McGurn

Opinion

Let black kids learn

When Donald Sterling told his mistress not to bring African-Americans to Los Angeles Clippers games, the story went viral — and Sterling was banned for life by the National Basketball Association.

Meanwhile, New York City runs a school system in which only a fraction of African-American children are taught anything. It’s a systemwide failure that cuts these children off from the opportunities of this century and condemns them to life on the margins of the American Dream.

About this there is no outrage. No one loses his job. Even though the numbers are scandalous.

According to the Regents exams, only 11 percent of black males who leave a New York City high school with a diploma are ready for college. In the lower grades — third through eighth — only 15 percent of African-American students are proficient in math and reading. The National Assessment of Educational Progress finds roughly the same, with only 18 percent of New York City’s African-American eighth-graders proficient in reading and 13 percent in math.

The high failure rate means one of two things. Either black children can’t learn, or the city has a school system wildly out of whack with what kids need.

Plainly black children can learn. Because at other schools, they are learning.

They learn at elite private schools, which have expanded their outreach. They learn at Catholic schools, from the all-scholarship Regis High to the neighborhood parochial school. The Archdiocese of New York — which puts its black high school population at 14 percent — reports that 99 percent of its students graduate and 98 percent go on to a two- or four-year college.

Black children also learn in charters. Though city charters range in quality, African-American students at the most successful compete with the best in the state. Even overall, when African-American students in charters are measured against their peers in district schools, the charter kids do better — which explains a wait list 50,000 long.

So put ideology aside. The pattern of black achievement suggests that if you were designing a system where African-American children will learn, you wouldn’t place most in traditional district schools. Instead, they’d be in schools where they have a better chance of learning — whether charter, Catholic or private.

What would that mean in New York? It would mean standing the entire system on its head.

It’s not all that implausible. New Orleans is already doing it.

Unlike New York, New Orleans is a majority African-American school system; 89 percent of its public-school students are black, and most are poor. Pre-Katrina, they just weren’t learning.

After the hurricane, instead of simply replacing the buildings, New Orleans reimagined what its education system ought to look like. In terms of the type of schools that predominate, it’s turned the pyramid upside down.

For the 43,000 public-school students in New Orleans, traditional district schools are no longer the norm but the outlier; 84 percent of these kids attend charters. In addition to these students, another 38,280 city schoolchildren go to Catholic schools, and a few thousand more are home-schooled or at non-Catholic private schools.

Eric Lewis of the Black Alliance for Educational Options explains the ideal this way: “Our goal is a system that puts every child in the school best suited for that child.”

This is the true progressivism of our day, and New Orleans is pushing it in a number of ways. For example, they’ve removed a state cap on the number of charter schools. Later they added a scholarship program for kids trapped in failing schools.

The Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives tracks the changes in New Orleans’ school system. Its report for 2012 describes the effect on student achievement this way:

“In the years since Hurricane Katrina, public schools in New Orleans have seen standardized-test performance improve, fewer students attend failing schools and more students graduate from high school prepared for college and the workplace. The progress extends to all school types and all performance measures.”

New Orleans, of course, remains very much a work in progress. While the improvements are real, because it started from such a low level it has a ways to go even to catch up with the rest of Louisiana. The good news is more black children are learning; more are leaving high school ready for college; and more parents have better options.

How many African-American moms and dads in New York City would say that?

In the heyday of American progressivism, an urban school system that was failing an entire race of its children would have provoked loud calls to stop tinkering around the edges — and start changing the whole way we think about public education. The idea would be to make institutions serve the needs of the people, instead of the other way around.

Why not today?