How Progressive Feelings Ruin Schools
By Douglas Marolla
Common Ground
J. Anthony Lukas’ book Common Ground is the gold standard of the Boston busing debacle in the 1970s. Lukas shows in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book how the elites, who seemed determined to manage the population, do untold amounts of destruction to people’s lives. What is rarely talked about when it comes to the school busing fiascos of the past is the effect it had on working-class people.
Common Ground follows three families. The black family is horrified by being forced to send their kindergarten-aged daughter on a bus for an hour into a hostile neighborhood. They know she will be scared and unable to focus on school. The mother hates the idea of doing this, has no interest in busing her children into a white neighborhood, and tries to avoid sending her five-year-old daughter into a terrible and potentially dangerous situation. It’s a heartbreaking story and it is the part of the book I remember most clearly, even after 30 years.
The white liberal family moves into a gentrifying neighborhood and is happy about busing and happy about moving into a gentrifying area. They live there for about 6 years. Eventually, street crime, violence, and school problems push them into moving to a nearby Massachusetts suburb, Newton. The white liberal family has the ability and the means to move out of a bad situation. The black family did not.
Lukas’s book was a Pulitzer Prize-winning example of brutally honest investigative journalism. It should be required reading in every education school and sociology class. What Lukas does in Common Ground is painstakingly explain the horrors that exist when the elite try to play God. The progressive elites of the ’60s and the ’70s did not like how neighborhoods were racially imbalanced and, rather than ask anyone why, or ask if they preferred busing, they decided that they would change things. The Progressive Elite arbitrarily agreed that diversity is important, necessary, and good. Therefore, they would physically remove children from their neighborhood schools to mix the races in the same way that a biologist might mix microbes in a Petri dish. Common Ground gives you chapter and verse on the thinking of the worst of the species, the progressive white elite affluent liberal – who has all the answers but asks no questions. Because they don’t live in the city or around working people, they are immune to criticism or any consequences.
One would expect after such a monumental tome was published, one that completely obliterated any justification for school busing or the management of working people, that they would stop trying to implement (by force) their idea of a perfect society.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The Boston School Case
On Monday, December 9th, the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari to the Boston specialized school case Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp.v. The School Committee for the City of Boston. This time it was the Black Lives Matter movement and those in its orbit who decided that, because the racial percentages in Boston’s three specialized schools didn’t fit the racial demographics of their areas, the admissions policies of those schools were biased. The racial demographics didn’t fit what they thought they should be at those specialized schools.
Here we go again.
Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant) are selective public high schools that serve academically gifted students in the City of Boston. They are considered top schools, exemplars of American public education, and are ranked among the nation’s top high schools annually.
In this case, the Boston Parent Coalition challenged a temporary admissions policy implemented by the Boston School Committee for its 3 elite public schools. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the committee suspended entrance exams and adopted a system that considered students’ grade point averages, zip codes, and family income. The coalition argued that this policy discriminated against white and Asian students, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it led to a decrease in admissions for these groups compared to previous years.
Conversely, the School Committee defended the policy as a necessary measure to address historical racial inequities and to promote diversity within the schools. They contended that the admissions criteria were race-neutral and aimed at providing equal educational opportunities by considering socioeconomic factors and geographic representation. The committee maintained that the policy did not intentionally discriminate against any racial group but sought to create a more equitable admissions process during unprecedented times.
Notice how COVID-19 was used as an excuse to change school district policy.
The Boston School Committee maintained these concepts, but eventually, the obvious truth came out. In a text message exchange obtained by the Boston Globe, school committee Chair Alexandra Oliver-Davila texted committee member Lorna Rivera: “Best school committee meeting ever. I’m trying not to cry”, as the committee was working to eliminate the exam requirement.
“Wait until the white racists start yelling at us,” Rivera texted back. “Whatever. They’re delusional,” texted Oliver-Davila. “I hate WR,” she texted Rivera again, a reference to the city’s West Roxbury neighborhood. “Sick of Westie whites,” Rivera replied. “Me too. I really feel like saying that” Oliver-Davila texted.
Oliver-Davila eventually resigned in a statement that exemplifies the stupid and destructive reasoning behind her motives: “I regret my personal texts, it was inappropriate,” she wrote. “But I am not ashamed of the feelings from history that made me write those words.”
This is what passes for school district policy in the Progressive Liberal school district – feelings from history. Why, if the school district is over 70% black, is the black population of those schools only 40%? Why is the school committee not asking that question? What is going on in the black neighborhood middle schools? Is it possible the students are not prepared or disciplined to pass a rigorous exam? If not, why not? These questions are taboo in today’s urban school districts, including the one in which I work.
The Boston School Committee got what it wanted. For fall 2021, the share of white students at BLS, BLA, and O’Bryant fell by nine percentage points (from 33 percent to 24 percent), while the share of Asian American students fell by five percentage points (from 21 percent to 16 percent). One Asian student who had a higher GPA than all the admitted students – was not admitted into any of the three specialized schools.
History will not necessarily repeat, but it will echo. As in Common Ground, the families who can afford to sue will sue. So far, because SCOTUS refused to hear the case, they have taken a loss in this regard. Moreover, the families that can afford to move, or send their children to private schools will do so. That the race-obsessed Progressive, whose feelings are in control, has contributed to the destruction of historically successful educational institutions, does not matter.
As has happened in the past, these kinds of decisions destroy exam-based meritocratic schools. As standards are lowered, teachers leave. Concerned parents of all types move away. City College in New York City was ruined. Dunbar High School in DC was crushed. The Progressive Liberal movement has tried (and so far, failed), to ruin the NYC Specialized High Schools. Naturally, the black community always loses. The schoolchildren, instead of being pushed, intellectually stimulated, and taught to strive for success, has the Elite do-gooder on the top assuaging her feelings and trying to “right historical wrongs”.
The pattern is always the same. The black and Hispanic neighborhood schoolchildren have educational opportunities snatched away. But at least the right people feel better.
