That whole “equity” thing that the Biden administration and liberals obsess over is a scam. When it’s not flat-out functioning as reverse racism, it’s actually perpetuating the very problems it’s supposed to fix.
The New York Times on Monday ran an op-ed by journalist RiShawn Biddle arguing that remote learning in public schools should be extended as an option for students indefinitely, especially because minorities were most in favor of it throughout 2020.
“School districts shouldn’t add to the burdens of the families already suffering from educational and health disparities,” wrote Biddle. “Remote learning should remain available even after Covid is no longer an epidemic.”
There are surely some parents out there still worried about COVID-19, and the pandemic did hit black and Latino people especially hard, but remote learning has largely proven to be catastrophic for academic development. And you could probably guess that it was even worse for minority students.
The Washington Post reported in October that the achievement gap between white students and minority students in Washington, D.C., public schools significantly widened for the pandemic-time year:
At the beginning of the current academic year, the number of Black children who met the literacy benchmarks dropped by 14 percentage points, to 31 percent. For White students, it dropped six percentage points, to 67 percent. Latino students dropped 12 percentage points, from 42 percent of students passing the exam to 30 percent.
If “systemic racism” is already putting minorities at a disadvantage, why would we want to exacerbate that problem with remote “learning”?
This is yet one more “equity” solution that does the exact opposite of what people who say they care about equity advocate for.
