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The problem is discipline. When you can't kick out the troublemakers (and there's a problem where the kids have a legal right to an education and can't be left out of school permanently, so down the line some unfortunate school ends up forced to take the dregs) and it's white supremacy systemic racism to correct homework or have standardised tests, and failing kids is disproportionate (and of course racist) punishment of minorities, then you end up with a situation where (the same with security guards and shoplifters) the teachers, aides, other school staff don't step in and intervene (because laying a hand on one of the precious blossoms is assault and will get you into trouble) and they just pass the kids at the end of the year on to the next class (because not graduating them is also racism plus costs the school administration money).
Nikole and all the other activists and white liberal allies created this situation, and now she's astonished to learn that her daughter was being failed? So long as daughter came home with "I got another A on the test, Mom!" there was no need to go over her homework, or check if she was learning anything. That would have taken valuable time away from Mom's work and she would never have won that Pulitzer for The 1619 Project.
As for failing algebra - remember, maths is racist!
It’s worth noting that actual normie black parents are usually the first in line to demand schools bring back paddling. They believe in discipline but have trouble enforcing it without external assistance.
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I agree with this. I would simply say- different types of kids need different types of schools. The type of kid who's impulsive, low IQ, and starting fights at school would benefit immensely from a school that stresses discipline and rote memorization, which seems to be the path that Mississippi has used in its "miracle." A kid who's extremely bright would probably benefit more from something like the Montesorri schools, where they get a lot of freedom to explore whatever they want at their own speed, and encouraged to think creatively. I obviously don't know what Nikole's daughter is like, but I'm imagining a kid who's just relatively normal - pretty well behaved but not perfect, reasonably smart but not a genius, etc. For a kid like that, a normal American public school works fine, but only if they have way to limit and deal with the real problem children.
Also, yeah, probably not a shock that a black woman who writes professionally is much better at words than at numbers. That's fine, there's nothing with that, but we can't be blowing smoke up their asses and pretending like they're acing the math exams when they're really not.
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Y tho?
Universal K-12 education is, in the West, only a reality since the end of World War 2 at the earliest. Even still, my parents (late 1940s births) easily recall multiple classmates dropping out at various times in high school to start working (usually a family small business like a restaurant).
Articles like this one also show that somewhere between 25-50% of kids who are "graduating" aren't anywhere near where a High School Graduate of, say, 1965 would be in terms of ability across all subjects.
So why the continued farce and the presumption that there is some sort of "right" to ~12-14 years of education on the state's dime?
One of the more common arguments I hear is that "I don't want to live around stupid people." But, again, everyone already does unless you're smart and financially productive enough to buy your way into a non-stupids-allowed community. A HS diploma (or, for that matter, a bachelors, masters, or PhD) doesn't mean a person is somehow immune to making bad personal choices and/or horrific anti-social choices. "moRe EduCaySHun!" Is one of those meaningless battle shouts of the emotion-first sort who earnestly meant "black lives matter!" during 2020 and "trust the science!" .... also in 2020.
Related, most of the meta-studies on educational outcomes I've read boil down to the idea that once a school is past a basic threshold of quality (i.e. no metal detectors, not a common location for police calls etc.) that most of the difference in outcomes is explained by parental involvement in a child's education. Again, the NHJ story does a great job of pointing out that NHJ checked out of her own child's education for a decade. Contrast that to the cosmopolitan PMC class common meme experience of "Dad would yell at me over Algebra homework every night in 8th grade, lulz."
Most "right to education" arguments, imho, boil down to the same logical fallacy - no one is preventing you from educating your own child. The "right to education" people ask for is "the right to outsource educating my child to the state (which, by extension, means socializing the bill for it as well)." Throw in the truly evil organizations that are Teachers Unions and you have the recipe for a perverted race to the bottom.
A return to homes-school-plus style education has knock on effects for society as well. Historically, a lot of the "one room schoolhouse" establishments were provided out of necessity through collective action of the locals. It gave the kids an education, and the parents a day care center while they focused on the arduous labor of an agrarian life. Furthermore, the social stakes were much higher. The children were going to school with the children of their neighbors. If a kid was being disruptive, the whole town would know and the parenting abilities of the family would be drawn into question. The kids knew, explicitly, that behaving well around their peers was necessary for social and even physical survival in the future. If Little Timmy was a terror in the 5th grade, he might not find the loan waiting for him after a bad harvest.
While I'm not advocating for such a harsh RETVRN to highly constrained social systems I am, as always, advocating for a much more explicit and consequence heavy form of pro-social behavioral forming. This is why, elsewhere, I've advocated for a soft return to bullying. When we don't shape the behavior of kids, we do them no favors. They grow up maladjusted and end up dead or incarcerated. Not kicking a kid out of 6th grade for being out of control isn't a tender mercy, it's just a rolling forward of social debt that gets paid out on the floor of a NYC subway car (Daniel Penny reference, too lazy to direct link).
A "basic right" to education creates the incentive to lie to children, the same way a "basic right" to healthcare creates the incentive to lie to the unhealthy. As soon as you guarantee something, taking it away becomes an injustice. Better to have an earned-reward system, even if that earning is such a basic threshold that not clearing it is an obvious sign of social malignancy.
I’m firmly in favor of tracking kids. I think kids should be in some form of education through 18. I just don’t think trying to force everyone through a pre-college curriculum is good for lower achieving students. No amount of IEP and extra help is going to take a kid who reads like a first grader in ninth grade and make him capable of doing even community college work. I’m not even convinced you could take a kid with the reading comprehension and math skills of a sixth grader and get him ready for university level work. The bad thing, for them about trying to do such a thing is that basically you set his expectations far above what he can actually accomplish, so anything less than university and white collar work is beneath him, but you also fail him by not teaching him the kinds of skills he can actually use to support himself. Teach a kid with a sixth grade reading comprehension and math skills to do trade work, and he can not only support himself, but if he works hard enough might even own his own business. A kid with worse skills might not be able to do that, but maybe could do simple line cooking or manual labor or something. But if those kids try to compete with high achieving students who can leverage those skills, they’ll just end up unemployed and probably unemployable.
At the same time, those kids will slow down the education of the rest of the class to their level. The kid who’s disruptive because he doesn’t understand the concept of algebra is holding back other kids. Having the teacher repeat lessons because he can’t do them slows the class down as well. The smart kids end up never developing their skills to their potential because they’re stuck in classes with kids much dumber and the curriculum is geared to them.
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