It's hard to blame slavery and poverty for education failure when one of Michigan's wealthier cities and school districts has the following achievement results by race.
Birmingham, Michigan has a median income of approximately $94,000... more than twice the median income for all of Michigan... and spends about $16,000 per pupil for education. It would seem that neither taxing nor spending was an issue in the education results for Birmingham, Michigan.
Well what about racial makeup? There are arguments that when there are too many minorities in a district, they are disadvantaged versus more predominately white districts. The challenge laid down is to get more appropriate racial "diversity"... a percentage of students more reflecting the minority versus white overall population.
In the U.S., blacks make up approximately 13% of the population according to the U.S. Census Bureau:
The student racial makeup in Birmingham, Michigan is [source]:
So here is the environment:
- A school district that is wealthy and spends a lot of money educating its children
- A school district that is "diverse" to the point of being a microcosm of the U.S. overall population
If you give an ethnic group every possible opportunity to succeed and it still fails in the same environment which majority students succeed, is it still appropriate to blame lack of spending and opportunity? Or is it now time to step up to the reality that there is something very dysfunctional about either the abilities or culture of the minority? It might be easy to blame "the system" for the failure of Detroit's educational outcomes... a system controlled by blacks and populated by blacks, incidentally. But the outcomes in Birmingham can hardly be attributed to lack of opportunity or support or "the system" or "slavery" or "discrimination."
In the case of black students, perhaps it is time for the black community to take a long, hard look at itself and its values and its attitudes and say, "How do we have to change instead of trying to place the blame for our failures on others?"
Remember, the results are based on grades 3 through 8 testing. Children in those grades should still be interested in learning and school, especially when they have the opportunity to attend the kind of schools available in Birmingham, Michigan. The fact that black children are achieving less than they should be based on comparison with their white counterparts is not an indictment of the children or their schools, but it is an indictment of their families and the lack of enthusiasm and support for education, personal academic goals, and academic achievement.
It is an indictment of the black community that really needs to look in their mirrors to see who is holding black children back.
RELATED:
From Jason Gillman at Michigan Taxes Too Much:
“After being indoctrinated from birth that you are inferior to the point of needing government assistance to equalize your place among men, is it unreasonable for anyone to expect that you might learn to accept that fact and live the life of an inferior?”..