Thomas Sowell’s column today digs into a recent controversy in Berkeley, where the “racial achievement gap” (that is, white and Asian students doing substantially better than black and Latino students) is to be attacked by reducing the amount spent on science education so as to spend more on social work and remediation.
What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that this plan is enthusiastically supported by the educational theorists. Sowell writes that a University of San Francisco professor of education praised it because it’s vital to “narrow the achievement gap.” Moreover, Sowell continues, “In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to ‘privileged’ parents and ‘privileged’ children who want to ‘forestall any progress toward equity.'”
Welcome to the bizarre world of education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are “privileged” as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is “equity” among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.
