The following certainly seems to be a pattern. First in San Francisco and now in Seattle.
From Hot Air:
“Progressive educators attack tracking and advanced math courses on the grounds that equity demands everyone be in the same classroom. Somehow this was supposed to improve things for the mostly black and Hispanic students who were falling behind without doing any harm to the mostly white and Asian kids who had previously been in the advanced classes.
Eventually, San Francisco figured out that it didn’t work. Apart from making life much harder for the advanced kids, some of whom had to take a year of math in summer school to keep up with their college-bound peers in other cities, getting rid of Middle School algebra did nothing for the students on the other end of the achievement gap. The city eventually reversed course once the failure of de-tracking became undeniable.
In Seattle many parents were not happy when certain classes were cancelled in the guise of DEI.
After some back and forth, the district’s chief of equity, partnerships, and engagement, Keisha Scarlett wrote, ‘I also fundamentally believe that we don’t advance racial equity as a measure toward racial and education justice through a focus on increasing access and inclusion. These are band-aids to camouflage institutional racism.’”
First of all what is a “chief of equity, partnerships, and engagement” other than a poppycock spewer?
Anyone with a frontal lobe could explain to Keisha Scarlett that this would not work. The lower end students would not benefit, and many of the higher end students would transfer to private schools that offered the advanced classes that are necessary to compete for college admissions.
Again from Hot Air:
“All of this was predictable and was in fact predicted by parents who warned the school system in advance that it was a bad idea to tear down the current system without coming up with a solid replacement and putting that in place first. The city didn’t listen (just as it didn’t when it jumped on the “defund the police” bandwagon” in 2020).
Finally, it seems the city is coming around but only after losing a bunch of its best students and taking advanced classes away from many more. This was always a terrible idea. The fact that DEI made it seem not just positive but necessary should be cause for some much needed reflection on the value of DEI in education.”
4/1/25