Reason, Liberty, & Culture


Lies Surround Racism Claims in Public Schools

by Lewis Loflin

An AP article "Report: Low Grad Rates in US Cities" was recently published April 1, 2008 in the Kingsport Times-News. It contrasted the massive differences in graduation rates in urban (mainly non-white) versus suburban (mainly white) school systems. Many urban schools have graduation rates as low as 30 percent. Experts call that "a catastrophe."

The problem here is what was not reported, and is typical for news organizations such as the AP that make political correctness a policy. The issue is race and its use as a political issue to further promote leftist' politics. The failure of the left has degenerated into a type of racial Marxism. See How Marxism became racism.

To quote,

Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with the lowest graduation rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland...The report, issued by America's Promise, found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's largest cities receive diplomas. Students in suburban and rural public high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts in urban public high schools...

The report found troubling data on the prospects of urban public high school students getting to college. In Detroit's public schools, 24.9 percent of the students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis Public Schools and 34.1 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District...Many metropolitan areas also showed a considerable gap in the graduation rates between their inner-city schools and the surrounding suburbs.

Researchers found, for example, that 81.5 percent of the public school students in Baltimore's suburbs graduate, compared with 34.6 percent in the city schools. In Ohio, nearly 83 percent of public high school students in suburban Columbus graduate while 78.1 percent in suburban Cleveland earn their diplomas, well above their local city schools...

Nowhere in this report was race brought into the discussion because of political correctness. But if one is not willing to discuss the problem, then there will be no chance of fixing it even if a "fix" was possible.

More data from the study:

  • 52 percent of students in the 50 largest school districts on average fail to graduate with a high school diploma.
  • The Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Baltimore school districts all had graduation rates below 40 percent.
  • 13 school districts had graduation rates between 40 and 50 percent, including Minneapolis, Dallas, New York City, Denver, and Miami.
To further quote,
The study found that on average 58 percent of students in urban districts graduated compared to 75 percent of students in the suburban communities. For example, the principal Baltimore school district had a graduation rate of less than 50 percent. Suburban areas within the Baltimore municipality located adjacent to the principal school district had graduation rates of 70 to 80 percent and 80 to 90 percent. An area even further out from the principal school district had graduation rates of 90 to 100 percent.

Ten Cities of 100,000 or more with Highest Percentage of Blacks or African Americans, 2000

Black population is big cities 2000

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000.

Chicago: Black 36.8%, Hispanic 26% According to the Chicago Tribune (July 5, 2006) the graduation rate was 53%.

Indianapolis population: white 69%, black 26%, Hispanic 4% but school enrollment is only 24% white, 76% non-white at 58% black. Free/reduced lunch 78%.

According to the study, of the 50 largest cities 34 graduation rates that were under 60%, these are under 50%:

Philadelphia City School District 49.6% rate. 87% non-white with 62% black. Mayor Michael A. Nutter is a black Democrat.

Miami Dade County School District 49.0% rate. 60% Hispanic, 28% black, 10% white. Mayor Manny Diaz is Hispanic Democrat.

Oklahoma City Oklahoma City Public Schools 47.5% rate. 68.4% White, 15.4% Black (2000), can't find school makeup along racial lines, but lots of accusations of segregation. If the pattern elsewhere holds true, the number of non-white students in its public schools far exceeds their percentage in population.

Denver County School District 46.3 rate. Going by the Colorado CSAP (www.dpsk12.org), whites made up about 18.6% of students in grade three from 2005-7. They scored 77% at/above proficiency in math while a whopping 62% of blacks/Hispanics scored below (or 38% proficient) with Indians even lower at 60% failed. This is a good general indicator of graduation rates. But by grade 10 in math all dropped badly. Whites still far out-scored blacks/Hispanics with a proficiency of 37%, blacks/Hispanics and Indians at a crushing 4% in the same school system taking the same test.

Milwaukee Public Schools 46.1 rate. To quote The Achievement Gap in Milwaukee Public Schools: Outcomes by Gender, Race, and Income Level by Sammis White, Ph.D., "African-American males have a graduation rate of about 31%, and Hispanic males have an estimated graduation rate of 36%. The white male rate of graduation from MPS is estimated to be 66%...The MPS African-American female graduation rate is estimated at 46%, Hispanic female, 50%, and white female, 75%, in a state where the average overall graduation rate is 88.8%..." That's in the same school system, same teachers, same test!

To quote 'Crisis' graduation gap found between cities, suburbs by Greg Toppo on the 50 largest cities, Collectively, they educate 1.7 million high school students - about one in eight. Yet they account for nearly one in four students who don't graduate each year...

Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta
Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta.
She is a black Democrat.

Atlanta City School District 46.0 rate. To quote the The Schott Foundation (www.blackboysreport.org), "At Grade 8, two-third's of the district's Black male students read at less than the Basic level and virtually none reach the Advanced level...Over nine times the share of Atlanta's Black male students score below the Basic level in Grade 4 Mathematics as the district's White, non-Hispanic male students.

The percentage of the district's White male students scoring at the Advanced level in Grade 4 is quite extraordinary...White, non-Hispanic male students were admitted to Atlanta's Gifted and/or Talented programs at nearly ten times the rate for Black, non-Hispanic male students, while Black, non-Hispanic male students were placed in Mental Retardation classifications at nearly six times the rate for White male students."

Kansas City School District 45.7 rate. Mayor Mark Funkhouser is a white Democrat.

Oakland Unified 45.6 rate. Mayor Ron Dellums is a black. To quote Wiki: "Dellums was the first African American elected to Congress from Northern California and the first openly socialist Congressman..."

Los Angeles Unified 45.3 rate. Mayor Antonio Ramon Villaraigosa is Hispanic, Democrat. 46.5% of the population is Hispanic. Villaraigosa was a leader of the racist hate group MEChA at UCLA. Much of the population doesn't speak English.

New York City Public Schools 45.2 rate. 85% of school system non-white. Mayor Democrat

Dallas ISD 44.4 rate. Mayor Tom Leppert is a Republican elected in 2007. Superintendent of Schools Michael Hinojosa is a Hispanic and produced the $64 million shortfall fiasco in 2008. Dallas is 51% white, 35.6% Hispanic, 25.9 black. (2000)

Minneapolis Public Schools 43.7 rate. Mayor R. T. Rybak is a white Democrat.

Columbus Public Schools 40.9 rate. 67.93% White, 24.47% black. Mayor Michael B. Coleman is a black Democrat.

Baltimore City Public School System 34.6 rate. Mayor Sheila A. Dixon is a black Democrat.

Cleveland Municipal City School District 34.1 rate. Mayor Frank G. Jackson is a black Democrat.

Indianapolis Public Schools 30.5% rate. 76% non-white, 58% black. Mayor Gregory A. Ballard is a white Republican.

Detroit City School District 24.9 rate. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been there since 2001 (since removed for corruption), is a Democrat, and is in jail. His mother, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, represents Michigan's 13th District in the United States House of Representatives, and serves as the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus in the 110th United States Congress. Another Democrat.

Richmond, Virginia wasn't included in the top 50 largest cities, but its graduation rate is another appalling 47%. Mayor Douglas L. Wilder is a black Democrat and former state governor. In Washington D.C. every mayor since 1975 have been black Democrats including the drug using Marion Barry. Washington only graduates 58% of its students.

What conclusion can we come to?

The facts are obvious that most major cities in America are mostly non-white and the power structures are mostly Democrat and most mayors, and school heads are non-white. To claim all of this failure is the result of white racism is irrational to the extreme. Only two conclusions are possible:

  1. The Democratic Party, the left wing teachers unions such as the NEA, and black/Hispanic leaders have conspired to produce the failures of their schools so as to advance a political agenda or to demand more funding from white Americans. I don't buy that.
  2. Or this failure is an integral facet of minority races be it culture or genetics. I prefer to believe culture, but regardless it's their problem and it's wrong to blame others. In other words even with equal treatment we still get unequal results. That's not racism.

Going by the school systems listed in the AP article, if school systems like Detroit (nearly all non-white) have graduation rates of 30 percent, then the 70 percent that dropped out are black and Hispanic. They make up most of the dropouts nationally. This is not because of racism or exclusion, but a possible problem of IQ, culture, and self-inflicted stupidity. Stupidity such as children born out wedlock, choosing to drop out of school, and using drugs.

Some data from the Manhattan Institute (www.manhattan-institute.org), a study paid for by Bill and Linda Gates reports:

70% of all students in public high schools graduate

51% of all black students graduate
52% of all Hispanic students graduate
54% American Indian students graduate
72% white students graduate
79% Asian students graduate.

To quote,

"Due to their lower college readiness rates, black and Hispanic students are seriously underrepresented in the pool of minimally qualified college applicants...the main reason these groups are underrepresented in college admissions is that these students are not acquiring college-ready skills in the K-12 system, rather than inadequate financial aid or affirmative action policies..."

So it isn't money and it isn't lack of rigging the system with affirmative action. I believe the black and Hispanic graduation rates are even worse than stated here because of fraudulent reporting on dropout rates used by many states under the No Child Left Behind program. They are moving to pass laws to enforce uniform reporting standards. (April 1, 2008 New York Times "U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula")

I believe the very low graduation in the urban schools in the AP article are more accurate for blacks and Hispanics in general, because these are schools mostly black and Hispanic to begin with. (And controlled by them and white liberals yelling racism on every street corner.) Let's turn again to the New York Times.

In a devastating article, "Most Students in Big Cities Lag Badly in Basic Science" (November 16, 2006), they made the mistake of placing white achievement rates beside that of black and Hispanic failures in the same schools systems, a PC no-no. The article concerned a study of ten cities (most of them also in the AP article) that fourth and eight graders to quote, "tested in science failed to demonstrate even a basic understanding of the subject..."

For blacks there was a 77 percent failure rate, for Hispanics it was 71 percent. But for whites in the very same schools, the success rate was 72 percent. The conclusion is obvious that in the same NEA and minority controlled school systems, with all students in the same schools and classrooms, about three-fourths of blacks and Hispanics fail while almost three-fourths of their white classmates pass.

Are we to believe these school systems are conspiring to advance white students over minority students? (Asians were not included in the study, Atlanta didn't even report Hispanics and whites where 81 percent of blacks failed.)

It should be no surprise this mirrors graduation rates for whites in the suburbs as well. Whites in these urban schools did about as well as the graduation rates in suburban schools in the same income bracket. Fact: Over 50 years of integration, special programs, race quotas, etc. hasn't changed the fact that whites and Asians far outperform blacks and Hispanics taking the same classes in the same schools. It has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with the student.

Also see Race behind school score declines.

To quote one opinion,

Scientists and Educators are beginning to realize that low intelligence is possibly due to genetic inheritance of historically low African American IQ levels... Some have suggested intermarriage with whites to raise black IQ levels, but many in both groups have found this to be a distasteful solution with fascist underpinnings. So, it is generally opposed.

This leaves African Americans with a permanently low IQ with no hope of remediation, because IQ is not a function of education. The tragedy is found in the mere 17%-25% graduation rates in African American high school statistics as children with low IQ who are forced to act as though they have high IQs predictably fail, giving them feelings of low self-esteem and worthlessness, and may precipitate their later tendency toward violent criminal behavior.

The New York Times raises this alarm as well that IQ is genetic and not just cultural. In In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice (New York Times Nov. 11, 2007) the PC police are already going into panic mode. To quote,

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited (meaning politically incorrect) racial prejudices a new potency.

The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal...We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused...

Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means "the egalitarian theory," that all races are equal, is proven false...many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings...

There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries, said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. It's not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better."

Does that mean they silence possible proof that threatens their political agenda? If IQ is proven true, the entire left-wing race-baiting industry is finished. And we already have racism against whites as it is because black and Hispanic failure which at minimum is there own fault if culture, and just reality if genetic. Whites today are constantly penalized and attacked for non-existent crimes very few were even alive to commit.

Black IQ is 85, Hispanic is about 90 as are American Indians north and south of the border. Thomas Sowell believes the IQ problem is culture and cites some valid examples. The problem that remains is IQ gap, which immigration isn't helping as Asians cause the same problems for both Hispanics and blacks that whites do. Is Asian achievement going to get them targeted as the next "racist" group?


What about education fraud? Quoting Professor Walter Williams:

Some of the greatest fraud occurs at the higher education levels — colleges and universities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of white high school graduates in 2016 enrolled in college, and 58 percent of black high school graduates enrolled in college. Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them?