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In general, I like Freddie DeBoer's takes on education. There's a lot of poor thinking about how if only... teachers were better paid, or worse paid; students were tested more, or tested less; unions were weaker, or stronger -- then things would be better. Freddie's there to point out that American public education is exactly what one would expect, given that it is full of Americans.
Enter his newest essay. American schools are exactly what you would expect, given their demographics, there isn't much to be done about that, the teachers and systems are exactly what they need to be, given the constraints they're under, and so... well off parents are racist for preferring schools that are allowed to expel the very lowest performing children.
Wait, what?
My main impression is that when he hears "bad kids," he's somehow thinking of a well meaning black kid who uses AAVE and wants to play sports ball more than learn math, but is in general pretty normal. And in a lot of classrooms it does. But sometimes, in some classrooms, it means a kid freaks out, smashes the other kids' stuff, sometimes hits the other kids, screeches, thrashes around on the floor, and then when they eventually leave, they come back five minutes later with candy in their mouth. None of the other kids are allowed to eat candy in that classroom even if they have it. It doesn't matter, the teacher just mutters to finish the candy quickly and get on with it.
Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually. It is a Problem with the laws and court decisions, not necessarily individual decisions on a school or even district level, but Freddie is simply wrong in how he talks about the "hardest to educate students." Education Realist was more on track when he wrote about the topic a couple of years ago.
This isn't the same disregulation most parents are pulling their kids out for, since they're in segregated classrooms, but is in fact the "hardest to educate students" that public schools are dealing with. As I recall Freddie did teach actual school at one point, but it looks like he was teaching high school composition, and for all his research, still underplays what the bottom of even normal suburban public schools are like.
I am surprised that you are surprised. Freddie has always been able to look reality in the face but only up to a certain point. It's easy to forget sometimes, but he really is a literal Marxist, and that informs everything he writes. In the redistributionist world of his dreams, these inequalities would not exist because no one would have the option of selfishly providing a better education for their own children by removing them from environments with disruptive students and taking resources away from those students.
It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.
The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.
If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?
There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism. The universalist egalitarian HBD denial seems to be East Coast Christianity (embodied by the likes of Quakers); there is a current of native anti-intellectualism that I can't pinpoint the source of (remember how the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into harder universal schooling by the Sputnik crisis); and "you can be anything you want!" denial of differences in individual talent is perhaps just mass-produced Hollywood fantasy.
I feel like you are projecting your map of local German politics onto the US in a way that doesn't really apply.
Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.
I would like to think I know both well enough to distinguish between them.
Not that I strictly agree, but I am not aware of making any claim that contradicts this, unless you think that Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing (which I think would be false, and the East Coast universalist-leaning denominations are my specific counterexample).
Its not that "Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing" so much as the left in the US defines itself (at least in part) through its opposition to "Christian Moralism".
The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".
As recently as Obama, Democratic presidents also made a show of their Christian beliefs and church attendance, and even in the '90s 90% of US adults self-identified as Christian. Do you think the "left in the US" popped into existence ex nihilo after that, freshly importing the belief system of the Soviet Union and throwing away everything that the >=40% who must have voted for them while considering themselves Christian believed in? There is such a thing as intellectual lineage, including from systems that someone now disagrees with. For centuries, Christians and Jews had nothing but occasionally murderous disdain for each other, but Christianity at no point denied straight up copying half of its holy book from the Jews, either. For a more spicy example, many a red-blooded American right-winger is quick to point out how the Nazis were more formally a National Socialist German Workers' Party, but there is little denying that they defined themselves (at least in part) through their opposition to communism!
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