Im-Politic: Just What New York City Public Schools Need?

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AAPI, African-American Studies, Asia/Pacific Islanders, black studies, education, Im-Politic, Latinos, math, National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York City, public schools, reading

Let’s say you’re in charge of a big city public school system and you know that students are way under-performing in basics like reading and math. You’d focus like the proverbial laser beam on improving their performance in basics like reading and math, right?

Not, evidently, if you’re in charge of the New York City public school system. Facing these circumstances, the City, reported The New York Times last Thursday, decided to “launch a new Black studies curriculum next fall that could eventually be used across hundreds of schools, part of a local effort to embrace lessons on race and culture that have sharply divided school districts around the country along political lines.”

The Times continued, “The Black studies curriculum in social studies will launch in a handful of classrooms in September, before expanding across grades pre-K to 12. An Asian American and Pacific Islander curriculum, which was taught in about a dozen schools this fall, will also expand across the system in 2024.”

As The Times account noted, it’s not as if these subjects have been absent from New York City public schools. Instead, teaching efforts along these lines are being expanded.

But even if the system never mentioned these identity groups in class (which I would consider a huge mistake), would they really deserve such priority attention now? If you think that mastering basics like reading and math are much more important building blocks of progress for disadvantaged groups, you may well  answer “No,” especially when you consider how poorly New York City students have performed in these subjects compared with their peers in other big city school systems and especially nation-wide.

The evidence is clear from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

As this gold standard evaluation effort makes clear (but aforementioned Times article never mentioned), for fourth and eighth grade reading and math (not the only results it presents, but representative enough), in 2019 (a good starting point since it was the final pre-pandemic year), New York City students almost always lagged their big city and national public school school counterparts in shares of students proficient in these subjects. And in 2022, they kept lagging.

Even worse, in no instance did any of these sets of U.S. students, for either year, remotely approach fifty percent. So it’s not like the bar was high. Indeed, by far the best proficiency rate recorded by any of these groups was the 40 percent of national fourth grade math public school students achieving this level in 2019.

New York City students’ highest score during these two years? Thirty two percent proficiency for fourth grade math students in 2019.

It should be noted, however, that New York City educators may not be solely responsible for choosing their cockeyed priorities. A poll last fall showed that 92 percent of black City voters supported introducing a black studies curriculum in the public schools starting in pre-kindergarten classes, and 92 percent “ voiced support for prioritizing Black studies as a means to improve the education delivered to students in the nation’s largest public school system.”

Here’s hoping these survey results don’t confirm Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

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Im-Politic: More Reasons to Think Americans Aren’t So Divided

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abortion, affirmative action, college admissions, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, education, gender, higher education, Im-Politic, LGBTQ, minorities, polarization, politics, polls, public schools, race relations, social issues, Supreme Court

RealityChek regulars know that a theme to which I keep returning centers on intriguing evidence that Americans’ views on supposedly polarizing social issues aren’t nearly as polarized as the positions taken by activists on all sides.  Indeed, the public’s views are a triumph of both common sense and a spirit of compromise that’s continually overlooked by the political class across the spectrum. (See, e.g., here on the overall national mood, and here on abortion – a subject of special interest lately given the Supreme Court’s June decision to reject the idea of a Constitutional right to privacy and therefore to abortion.)

So I’m pleased to report new findings of equally surprising and encouraging consensus on two other supposedly divisive wedge issues.

The first is affirmative action in higher education admissions, whose future (for the time being) will be decided by the Supreme Court beginning later this month, when cases challenging such racial preferences will be heard.

If the public opinion has anything to do with the final outcome, however, these programs will clearly be toast – at least according to research summarized in this Wall Street Journal column. As noted by the author, retired University of California, Santa Cruz literature professor John Ellis,

“A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.”

Most stunningly, even the African Americans who are the main intended beneficiaries of race-influenced admissions policies now strongly oppose the practice – along with three-fourths of the entire country.

Further, Ellis cites referendum results showing that uber-liberal California is off the affirmative action boat, too.

The second set of findings concerns the emotionally fraught matter of whether subjects like gender identity, sexual orientation, gay rights, and trans rights should be taught to pre-college students, and whether such materials on these “LGBTQ” topics belong in these students’ assigned reading.

A national survey from the University of Southern California (brought to my attention in this Washington Post article) makes clear that Americans are strongly opposed to these subjects in elementary school education, but much more open to bringing them into high school classes.

Specifically, the share of respondents agreeing that primary school students should learn about these subjects was only between 28 and 30 percent. But roughly twice as many Americans were fine with including LGBTQ subjects in high school curricula.

Somewhat oddly (at least to me) support for assigning LGBTQ-themed books was a good deal lower for both grade school students (18 percent) and for high school students (38 percent).

All the same, though, a strong consensus view – and one that should make intuitive sense as a starting point for making policy – shines through: Little kids just aren’t ready to be exposed to new challenges to longstanding ideas about gender identity and such. High school students? Much more so.

Of course, as we learned earlier this year with the Supreme Court’s latest abortion ruling, the fact that the public has figured out pragmatic ways to view complex social issues (simply put, supporting a broad right to an abortion early-ish during pregnancies and increasing restrictions as the pregnancy proceeds) is no guarantee that American leaders will be able, or want to, agree.

But as I pointed out in the above-linked abortion post, a powerful lesson taught by U.S. history has been that the Supreme Court “is most successful when it pays attention to public opinion, and runs into its greatest troubles when it gets too far ahead of or too far behind these attitudes.” The same surely applies to elected politicians and activists. Let’s just hope that all of them can get with the common sense approaches favored by Americans before further inflammatory actions really do produce dangerous and lasting national divides.