Reparations analysis: To promote equity, instead fix disadvantaged schools

Edward Ring reports for the California Policy Center on CA’s Reparations Task Force, which proposes to pay local descendants of enslaved people for “snowballed” generational trauma. Instead, Ring suggests, lawmakers should focus on improving educational opportunities for low-income and minority students — whose zip code schools are often inadequate.

Every sort of reparations that have been tried so far to atone for racism and discrimination, not just welfare, but affirmative action, have been counterproductive. The welfare state created by the Great Society programs of the 1960s contributed massively to government dependency and Black student underachievement. Affirmative action has undermined the immutable standards that are necessary for a society to thrive as a competitive meritocracy.

The consequences of affirmative action are as damaging to Black communities as welfare. The evolution of affirmative action into “equity” where proportional representation by race and ethnicity is demanded in everything — hiring, promotions, admissions, contracts, and even household wealth — is a mortal threat to the social and economic health of America. And both affirmative action and “equity” provide cover for the one place left in California where systemic racism still exists: the failing public schools in disadvantaged Black neighborhoods.

If the task force really wanted to do something to help the Black community, it should start with improving California’s K-12 public schools and addressing the failure of politicians beholden to the teachers’ unions to enact any real education reform. The task force recommendations include adopting a “K-12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity.” But nowhere to be found is any call to action for California’s schools to be held accountable for the fact that 84 percent of Black students did not meet grade-level math standards on the state’s student assessment tests this year. 

This article originally appeared in the California Policy Center. Read the whole thing here.

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