SCHOOLED ON CHARLOTTE: In this era of "resegregation"...

THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2019

...the data may diverge from the tale: Darn those voluminous math and reading scores from the Naep!

In this era of "resegregation," it can be hard to maintain preferred tribal tales in the face of those darn test scores!

Within our hapless modern press culture, elementary data and basic facts really aren't "stubborn things." Quite routinely, elite journalists prefer to tell tribally pleasing tales.

This is especially true when the New York Times reports on public schools.

Nothing will change the preferred story lines; our brains aren't wired for such work, especially on elite levels. But as we showed you yesterday, actual data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) complicate a preferred story line:

Over the past several decades, CMS has become "the most segregated school district in North Carolina," or so we were told in a lengthy report in Sunday's New York Times. Depending on how you measure such things, that assessment may even be accurate.

That said, wouldn't you know it? According to data from the so-called Main Naep, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's score gains in grade 8 math have gone through the roof in the past fourteen years, for black and white kids alike! It's "the most segregated school system" in the whole state—but its score gains have come thick and fast!

How awkward are those actual facts—the actual facts which went unmentioned and undiscussed in Sunday's New York Times? In yesterday's report, we showed you the score gains which have occurred since Charlotte-Mecklenburg began taking part in the Naep's Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) in 2003.

The systems's score gains in grade 8 math have gone through the roof. For an additional framework, here's how lower-income black kids scored in grade 8 math on the last administration of the Naep, with CMS ruling the world:

Average scores, lower-income black kids
Grade 8 math, Naep, 2017
Public schools nationwide: 255.02
Public schools statewide (North Carolina): 252.84

Atlanta: 253.50
Austin: 253.44
Baltimore: 249.36
Boston: 258.97
Charlotte-Mecklenburg: 262.92
Chicago: 257.24
Cleveland: 255.50
Dallas: 257.12
Denver: 255.27
Detroit: 243.17
Houston: 261.50
Los Angeles: 243.15
Miami: 254.65
Milwaukee: 240.29
New York City: 253.10
Philadelphia: 247.00
San Diego: 255.53

For all Main Naep data, start here.

Applying a standard though very rough rule of thumb, lower-income black kids in CMS outperformed their peers statewide by roughly one academic year.

They also outperformed their peers nationwide, and in every other urban system which takes part in the TUDA. (It's part of the Main Naep.) Among the big urban systems which were tested, only Houston, and maybe Boston, really came all that close.

That said, uh-oh! As CMS was "resegregating," performance substantially grew! Compared to other North Carolina systems, black kids in CMS showed tremendous score gains in grade 8 math, even as their system allegedly became the most "segregated" in the entire state.

This complicates the pleasing tale we were fed in Sunday's Times. In a lengthy report by Nikole Hannah-Jones, we were basically told, without quite being told, that this sort of thing can't/doesn't happen.

In our view, it's better when kids get to go to school with kids of other "races" and ethnicities. If we could bus in kids from Tibet, we'd support that approach.

That said, our liberal academics and journalists often substitute fairy tales for data and basic facts.

All too often, they seem to love their tribal tales more than the truth itself. Because they want their tales to stand, they may throw basic facts under the bus, with the interests of black kids to follow.

Let's be thorough! Charlotte-Mecklenburg hasn't recorded similar gains in the area of grade 8 reading. We'll look at those data tomorrow.

That said, it's amazing to see a major journalist go out of her way to cite CMS as a prime example of a familiar, pleasing tale—a familiar tribal tale which isn't gigantically accurate.

To offer a larger perspective, let's outline the story Hannah-Jones told about overall national progress in the years since the Brown decision outlawed dual school systems. Tomorrow, we'll compare the picture she drew to the actual national data.

Below, we reproduce two paragraphs from Sunday's Times report. We think they define a familiar story, one we were basically told in Sunday's Times without quite being told:

HANNAH-JONES (7/14/19): For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

[...]

We now know that school desegregation significantly reduced the test-score gap between black and white children—cutting it in half for some black age groups without harming white children. No other reform has reduced the gap on this scale. Rather, the opposite is true: The test-score gap between black and white students reached its narrowest point ever at the peak of desegregation and has widened as schools have resegregated.

Hannah-Jones makes the following claims. In the process, other impressions may be conveyed—impressions which may be inaccurate:

Five basic claims:
1) School desegregation significantly reduced the test-score gap between black and white children.

2) The gap was cut in half for some age groups.

3) This was done without harming white children.

4) The test score gap has widened as schools have resegregated.

5) When Charlotte-Mecklenburg was forced to integrate, "both black and white students saw achievement gains."

Quickly, let's run through those claims. After that, we'll identify the important fact which didn't bark.

In our view, the first of those five statements clearly seems to be accurate.

Based on the Naep data to which Hannah-Jones links, the achievement gap was indeed "significantly reduced" during roughly the first two decades of testing, starting in 1971. (Hannah-Jones describes 1988 as the point where "desegregation had peaked.")

(Warning: the large changes which occurred in this era would have been concentrated in the South. They would perhaps have reflected a one-time-only gain as southern systems were forced to abandon their horrendous "blacks only" schools and procedures.)

The second statement is also true, though we note the key word "some."

Within the "Long Term Trend" Naep data to which Hannah-Jones links, the gap wasn't cut in half, or anything like it, for 9-year-old students—not in reading, not in math. It was cut in half for 13-year-old students, though only if we assume that the "best" year of testing represents an "accurate" statistical representation.

Was this achieved "without harming white children?" White test scores stayed largely the same during this period. There's no way to know what would have happened if integration hadn't been forced on the South during this era. Nor does this matter, of course.

So far, Hannah-Jones' portrait is largely accurate. But when we reach statements 4 and 5, accuracy may start to suffer.

Is it true that "the test score gap has widened as schools have resegregated?" We'd score that as significantly misleading at best, possibly as flatly false. We'll show you data tomorrow.

With that, it's on to Charlotte! Is it true that "both black and white students saw achievement gains" in CMS during the era of busing?

There are no data which address that question at the link Hannah-Jones provides. At this point, Hannah-Jones has started to tell us a pleasing story without providing any actual facts.

She also declined to tell us this:

In CMS, "both black and white students" have made large gains in grade 8 math during the era she describes as "resegregation." But then, that's also true on a national basis.

This brings us to a major fact which almost never barks:

Over the past twenty-five years, black, white and Hispanic students have all recorded very large gains in math on the Naep, accompanied by fairly large gains in reading.

Those gains have been recorded during the era of "resegregation." In one very basic sense, that should be seen as good news.

Guess what! There is no way that our big urban systems will ever produce "integration" drawn from the era of Leave It To Beaver. Sadly, though, it's from that thoroughly bygone era that people at the New York Times seem to fashion their unhelpful dreams.

Moving forward, our big urban systems will continue to be heavily "segregated." Urban population patterns make that abundantly clear.

We can't "integrate" our way out of our current achievement levels or out of our current achievement gaps! But so what? In destructive service to a simple-minded dream, Hannah-Jones failed to mention the substantial test score gains the public should, at long last, be told about—the substantial score gains which could prove to be our salvation.

How did Charlotte-Mecklenburg produce those score gains in grade 8 math over that 14-year span? Why are its lower-income black kids outperforming their peers nationwide?

A decent person would wonder about the answer to such questions. But at the Hamptons-based New York Times, the very fact of those scores and those score gains must be disappeared!

As we've noted for years, this is a long-standing, amazingly uniform journalistic practice. You're allowed to hear about the gaps, but you can't be told about the gains! In such ways, basic facts keep getting disappeared in service to preferred tribal tales.

The public isn't allowed to know about the score gains which have occurred. In this way, the interests of black and Hispanic kids keep getting thrown under the court-ordered buses which aren't going to reappear.

Tomorrow: Some actual national data

Someone lied to Lawrence when he was young!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2019

The fellow has never recovered: How silly is the drivel we're handed on our tribe's favorite shows?

Consider the way Lawrence O'Donnell began Monday night's Last Word. He started with a silly claim about Trump's alleged racism.

He followed with a claim about the press corps' use of the tricky word "lie," a claim which was simply sad:

O'DONNELL (7/15/19): Tonight, the great national debate about “is Donald Trump a racist” appears to be over.

The debate started eight years ago in earnest in 2011, when Donald Trump first started talking about President Obama's birth certificate. That's when I started using the word "racist" about Donald Trump on this program, and the word “lie”.

But the American news media was not ready for either one of the words and it took the New York Times five full years after that to use the word “lie” to describe what Donald Trump says on a daily basis.

The New York Times finally called Donald Trump a liar in September 2016, when he already lied his way to the Republican presidential nomination.

The New York Times was five years late on "lying," but most of the rest of the news media was later than that. By the second year of the Trump presidency, though, everyone in the American news media had called Donald Trump a liar repeatedly. The Washington Post now keeps an official count of Donald Trump's lies.

To watch this monologue segment, click here.

Lawrence's claim about the "racist" debate was basically childish and silly. That debate is far from over. It isn't clear who's winning.

Regarding the claim about the word "lie," consider what Lawrence did:

Lawrence said that the Washington Post "now keeps an official count of Donald Trump's lies." As he said this, an image of this June 10 report flashed upon the screen.

The report was published by the Post's "Fact Checker" site. The headline on that report says this:

President Trump has made 10,796 false or misleading claims over 869 days

Newsflash: The Washington Post's Fact Checker site doesn't refer to misstatements as "lies." It tabulates "false and misleading statements." That's as far as it goes.

That's as far as the Fact Checker goes! Rightly or wrongly, it hasn't stampeded after Lawrence when it comes to the tricky term "lie."

Let's summarize:

Lawrence claimed that the Washington Post now keeps an official count of Trump's "lies." His point was that the Times and the Post finally bower to his own wisdom by using that tricky word.

As proof, he pointed to an official count by the Washington Post. That said, the Post's official count doesn't use the term "lies!"

You could almost say that Lawrence conned his viewers that night. An excitable person might almost decide to say that the gentleman lied!

SCHOOLED ON CHARLOTTE: Charlotte's black kids fight "resegregation!"

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2019

Math gains through the roof: What happened to achievement patterns in public schools after the Brown decision?

That question encompasses a 65-year span. In Sunday's New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones constructed the Standard Pleasing Fable concerning what has occurred.

Some of what Hannah-Jones wrote in her lengthy report was accurate. A good chunk of what she wrote pretty much was not. As always, the lives and the interests of the nation's black kids got thrown under [the story our team likes to tell concerning the use of] the bus.

In yesterday's report, we posted several passages which define the Hannah-Jones story line. This was her nugget account concerning what happened in the nation as a whole after the Brown decision:

HANNAH-JONES (7/14/19): We now know that school desegregation significantly reduced the test-score gap between black and white children—cutting it in half for some black age groups without harming white children. No other reform has reduced the gap on this scale. Rather, the opposite is true: The test-score gap between black and white students reached its narrowest point ever at the peak of desegregation and has widened as schools have resegregated.

In some respects, we'd score that account as true. In some respects, our grading would be less generous.

We'll look at that global account in the next few days. For today, let's consider Hannah-Jones' account of what has happened in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Schools (CMS) in the past four or five decades.

Currently, CMS is the nation's 18th-largest school district. For several decades, it engaged in large-scale busing as a result of a major 1971 court order.

According to Hannah-Jones, this is the CMS story up to the present day. This helps flesh out her larger account of what occurred nationwide:

HANNAH-JONES: [T]o say busing—or really, mandated desegregation—failed is a lie.

It transformed the South from apartheid to the place where black children are now the most likely to sit in classrooms with white children. It led to increased resources being spent on black and low-income children. There’s a story black people ruefully tell of the day they knew integration was coming to a black high school in Charlotte, N.C.: A crew of workers arrived to fix up the facilities because now white children would be attending. This is how two-way busing worked and why integration was necessary—white people would never allow their children to attend the types of inferior schools to which they relegated black children.

For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

Once again, here's what we've been told:

During the era of mandated busing, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's schools "were some of the most integrated in the country." During this era, "both black and white students saw achievement gains," we're told.

In support of these claims, Hannah-Jones links to this 57-page report by the National Assessment of Education Progress (the Naep). Unfortunately, that report doesn't say a single word, or present a single statistic, about anything that has happened in Charlotte-Mecklenburg's schools at any point in time.

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, did "both black and white students" record "achievement gains" during the era of busing? That Naep report doesn't say.

That Naep report does present test score data, in both reading and math, for the nation's kids as a whole. Depending on which years you want to cherry-pick, we'd say that some of Hannah-Jones' claims are true, while some are misleading or maybe even false.

More on that tomorrow. For today, let's consider more recent data from the Naep—data which tell us what has happened in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in this current era of "resegregation."

In our view, it would be better if kids went to school with kids of varied "races" and ethnicities. According to Hannah-Jones, this dream has died in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which "is now the most segregated district in North Carolina."

We don't know if that latter assessment is accurate. We're not even entirely sure what it means.

That said, we'll assume the claim is essentially true. As we told you on Monday, the claim derives from this study by the North Carolina Justice Society, to which Hannah-Jones fails to provide a sound link.

According to Hannah-Jones, CMS "is now the most segregated district in North Carolina." According to that study, the hyper-resegregated district "would need to re-assign 55 percent of its students to achieve racial parity across its schools."

More than half the system's kids would have to move to a different school! Meanwhile, what has happened to academic achievement in this era of "resegregation?"

Uh-oh! CMS math scores seem to have have gone through the roof during the era in question! Whether compared to the rest of the state, or to the nation as a whole, black and white kids in CMS schools have recorded remarkable gains.

This is one of the stories you weren't told in Hannah-Jones' fabulized, feel-bad account. That said, the data sit right before us in the Naep's extremely detailed, largely unreviewed data.

Let's take a look at those data! First, though, a quick bit of background:

Ever since 2003, CMS has participated in the Naep's Trial Urban District Assessment. Within this program, the Naep has been able to publish statistically reliable data for several dozen large school systems, including those in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

As such, the Naep has reading and math scores for CMS from 2003 through its most recent testing in 2017. This corresponds to the era of "resegregation" in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

Uh-oh! Despite what you've been encouraged to believe, score gains in math have gone through the roof in CMS during this period! That's true "for both black and white students." In grade 8 math, the score gains look like this:

Gains in average scores
Grade 8 math, Naep, 2003-2017

Black kids, CMS: 12.35 points
Black kids nationwide: 7.85 points
Black kids, state of North Carolina: -1.54 points

White kids, CMS: 14.51 points
White kids nationwide: 5.62 points
White kids, state of North Carolina: 1.47 points

For all Naep data, start here.

You're reading those data correctly. During that 14-year period, the average score of North Carolina's black kids actually went down in grade 8 math, if only slightly.

Meanwhile:

In "the most segregated district in the state," black kids' average score went through the roof. Based on a standard though very rough rule of thumb, black eighth-graders in CMS progressed by more than one academic year in math during that 14-year period.

CMS is a somewhat unusual urban/suburban school district. For that reason, we'll also show you the gains by the district's lower-income black kids (by kids who qualify for the federal lunch program):

Gains in average scores
Grade 8 math, Naep, 2003-2017
Lower-income black kids, CMS: 11.21 points
Lower-income black kids nationwide: 8.44 points
Lower-income black kids, North Carolina: -1.26 points

Here too, CMS kids progressed by more than one academic year while their peers across the state were losing a bit of ground. Data like these complicate the pretty tale Hannah-Jones seemed to be telling.

Alas! In the most segregated school district in the whole state, grade 8 math scores went through the roof during the era of resegregation. Black and white students both gained, and the recorded gains were large.

Good lord! There's no way to know, but based upon these Naep data, it's entirely possible that "the most segregated district in the state" actually recorded the highest math gains in the whole state during this era. This complicates the story Hannah-Jones chose to tell while citing the Naep as her source.

Also, it's Hannah-Jones who focused on CMS. That was her choice, not ours.

In our view, it would be better if kids went to school with kids of varying "races" and ethnicities. If we can bus in kids from Nepal, we'd like to see it done.

On the other hand, our nation contains some very large urban school systems—New York City first among them—whose student demographics will never permit the Leave It To Beaver-era racial balance which polemicists at the New York Times apparently dream of during their five-day Hamptons weekends.

Gotham's black and Hispanic kids will never be going to school with Wally and the Beav seated on either side. If those data from CMS are real, you'd almost think we'd want to know what that hyper-"segregated" school system has actually been doing in its math instruction.

That said, we very rarely show any signs of wanting to know such things. As "humans," we more reliably want to persist with our memorized novels, with our tribally pleasing tales.

In certain major respects, Hannah-Jones presented a tribally pleasing tale this Sunday. Concerning the interests of black and Hispanic kids, those interests get thrown under a certain fabulized bus when we insist on pleasing ourselves with our gloomy stories.

Not unlike Homer of old, we memorize and repeat these stories. Whose interests get served by that?

Tomorrow: National patterns

First, we came for all The Others!

TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2019

Then, we came for ourselves: Should the Washington Post have started a front-page news report today with the following statement?

PARKER, BADE AND WAGNER (7/16/19): President Trump on Monday defended his racist remarks about four minority lawmakers by alleging that they “hate our country” and should leave if they are unhappy—leading the Democratic congresswomen to respond by offering a competing vision of America that they said was based on inclusiveness.

We're going to vote for no. However obvious the highlighted usage may seem in the present moment, the judgment that Trump's remarks were "racist" remains a statement of opinion.

Post columnist Margaret Sullivan takes the opposite view in today's Style section.

She starts by applauding modern journalists for calling a "lie" a "lie." She then begins to outline her rationale for calling Trump's statements "racist:"

SULLIVAN (7/16/19): Now the question is the word “racist.”

Were Trump’s tweets portraying Democratic legislators of color as foreigners merely “racially tinged”? Were they just sprinkled with racially tinted pixie dust?

And should descriptions of what Trump stands for be put only in the mouths of his critics—a step removed from the journalists themselves?

Or should stronger language and sharper focus be used?

It depends on only one thing: whether journalists want to be clear about saying what’s right there in front of everyone’s eyes and ears.

Can Trump's baldly inaccurate, inflammatory comments be objectively described as racist? Sullivan seems to think that "everyone's eyes and ears" saw his comments that way.

That, of course, isn't true. Later, she settles on this:

SULLIVAN: It makes good sense for media organizations to be careful and noninflammatory in their news coverage. That kind of caution continues to be a virtue.

But a crucial part of being careful is being accurate, clear and direct. When confronted with racism and lying, we can’t run and hide in the name of neutrality and impartiality. To do that is a dereliction of duty.

Sullivan thinks the Post was simply being "accurate" when it went with "racist" in its front-page news report. She seems to think it's a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion or judgment, when Trump's irrational, inflammatory remarks are described that way.

Be careful what you wish for! In the last few days before Trump went off, our fearless liberal/progressive activists had begun dropping variants of the R-bomb on the heads of quite a few other members of our team and tribe.

Even worse, members of The Squad had begun subjecting us to the ultimate indignity. They'd begun dropping bombs on other Dems' heads, then piously insisting that they hadn't done so at all.

That's what Trump constantly does! Be careful what you wish for when tribal stampedes, and cultural revolutions, have begun taking place!

In the last day or so, pundits have been in a type of Olympic competition to see who could be more ardent in their assertion of Trump's racism. It often seems to us that these brave, bold modern journalists are perhaps protesting too much.

If we had lived the lives they've lived, we might feel that we've been complicit in Trump's success too. We too might feel a need to convince ourselves of our own moral goodness.

Plus, The Squad had already come for the gay Native American and for the Congressional Black Caucus! Might some pundits be afraid that The Squad might come for them next? Careers are hanging in the balance! Good jobs at good pay!

Anthropological newsflash:

For many people out there in this broad, sprawling nation, the racism Sullivan saw in those comments wasn't "right there in front of [their] eyes and ears." But then, our tribe has specialized, for many years, in acting like Those Others don't count, don't even seem to exist.

We cocoon with our favorite reporters and friends, with whom We All Say The Same Things.

The brains of our species are wired this way, top anthropologists tell us. This helps explain the endless tribal wars of our floundering species, or so these top experts say.

We liberals! We've begin devouring ourselves with our bombs! Trump's craziness created a distraction this time, but who will be racist next?

SCHOOLED ON CHARLOTTE: Fifty-three (or 85) outlying districts!

TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2019

The vast sweep of a good idea: On the merits, was mandated busing a good idea in 1975?

It's astounding to think that our current campaign has turned upon this question. "Consider the shortcomings of the species," disconsolate experts have told us. They report to us from the years which follow the conflagration they ruefully refer to only as Mister Trump's War.

It's amazing to think that this is the way we're conducting our current campaign. That said, Nikole Hannah-Jones thinks mandated busing was a good idea on the merits, and she may well be right.

In her lengthy essay in Sunday's New York Times, Hannah-Jones blew past the political problems which brought the era of busing to an end. In our view, she also blew past some basic facts—some basic facts about the era which followed the era of mandated busing.

For that reason, her lengthy report gives us a way to think about the extent to which you can trust and believe the things you read in the New York Times. We'll start supplying some missing facts in tomorrow's report.

For today, why does Hannah-Jones say that mandated busing was a good idea at that time on the merits? In large part, she bases her view on a highly familiar claim about certain things "we now know:"

HANNAH-JONES (7/14/19): We now know that school desegregation significantly reduced the test-score gap between black and white children—cutting it in half for some black age groups without harming white children. No other reform has reduced the gap on this scale. Rather, the opposite is true: The test-score gap between black and white students reached its narrowest point ever at the peak of desegregation and has widened as schools have resegregated.

We've highlighted the key claims in that passage. They go exactly like this:

According to Hannah-Jones, achievement gaps between white and black kids narrowed significantly in the era of desegregation. She also says that achievement gaps have widened in the era of "resegregation."

In support of her claims, she links to this 57-page report about the Naep's Long Term Trend Assessment program, a report which appeared in 2012. For ourselves, we'd rate one of Hannah-Jones' claims as true, one as false or highly misleading.

Later, Hannah-Jones links to the same 2012 Naep report as she discusses the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), which engaged in large-scale busing in the 1970s and 1980s. For the record, if you don't agree with Hannah-Jones, you may be involved in a lie:

HANNAH-JONES: [T]o say busing—or really, mandated desegregation—failed is a lie.

It transformed the South from apartheid to the place where black children are now the most likely to sit in classrooms with white children. It led to increased resources being spent on black and low-income children. There’s a story black people ruefully tell of the day they knew integration was coming to a black high school in Charlotte, N.C.: A crew of workers arrived to fix up the facilities because now white children would be attending. This is how two-way busing worked and why integration was necessary—white people would never allow their children to attend the types of inferior schools to which they relegated black children.

For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

According to Hannah-Jones, "both black and white students saw achievement gains" in CMS during the era of busing. As noted, she links to that 2012 Naep report—and that lengthy report doesn't include a single word about the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

Such "phantom links" are hardly unknown in the New York Times.

Hannah-Jones goes on to say that CMS is now "the most segregated district in North Carolina," but she fails to report achievement patterns during this post-busing era. So it goes as the New York Times continues its war on the lies!

Tomorrow, we'll start to show you what has happened in CMS in this post-busing era. We can do so because CMS has been taking part on the Naep's Trial Urban District Assessment program since 2003, a fact Hannah-Jones skipped past.

The data we show you will complicate the simple story Hannah-Jones tells. That said, our modern journalism is largely built upon simplified structures of this type. It's built upon simple-minded, novelized stories—fiction all the way down.

Starting tomorrow, we'll look at actual data! For today, let's take a moment to contemplate the sweep of that era's mandated busing programs.

Hannah-Jones thinks this era's mandated busing was a good idea on the merits, and she may well be right. That said, good God, but those programs were sweeping! Consider this part of Hannah-Jones' impassioned report:

HANNAH-JONES: Media and politicians blamed busing for the white flight from many cities, even though cities with large black populations suffered extensive white flight whether they instituted busing or not. They said busing stoked racial tensions, as if race relations had been just fine when black people stayed in their place.

And then in 1974 the Supreme Court, stacked with four Nixon appointees, dealt a lethal blow to Northern desegregation. In Milliken v. Bradley, it struck down a lower court’s order for a metropolitan desegregation plan that attempted to deal with white flight by forcing the all-white suburban school districts ringing Detroit to integrate with the nearly all-black city system. By ruling against a desegregation plan that jumped school district borders, the court sent a clear message to white Northerners that the easiest way to avoid integration was to move to a white town with white schools.

The Milliken ruling did play a key role in limiting the era of mandated busing. It also helps us see why the politics of mandated busing in that era were so fraught.

As Hannah-Jones notes, a lower court had ordered Detroit to forge a busing plan with some "all-white suburban school districts."

(Hannah-Jones says Detroit's system was "nearly all-black" at the time. According to at least one scholar, the school system was actually about two-thirds black at this point.)

The order from that lower court may have been a good idea on the merits. Detroit-area kids might have gained, in many ways, had the order gone into effect.

But good lord, that lower court order was sweeping! Here's the description offered by the legal site to which Hannah-Jones links:

OYEZ LEGAL SITE: A suit charging that the Detroit, Michigan public school system was racially segregated as a result of official policies was filed against Governor Milliken. After reviewing the case and concluding the system was segregated, a district court ordered the adoption of a desegregation plan that encompassed eighty-five outlying school districts. The lower court found that Detroit-only plans were inadequate. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the metropolitan plan. This case was decided together with Allen Park Public Schools v. Bradley and Grosse Pointe Public School System v. Bradley.

Good lord! One pointy-headed federal judge had taken control of eighty-five (85!) outlying school systems, along with that of Detroit itself!

It may well be that this judge's idea was a good idea on the merits, but this is the very definition of "judicial overreach." Within the American political system, there is no way that any such regime can last, whatever the merits of its ideas, orders and commandments may be.

As it turned out, the Supreme Court didn't let that order stand. The site to which Hannah-Jones links explains it like this:

OYEZ LEGAL SITE: In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education. The Court noted that desegregation, "in the sense of dismantling a dual school system," did not require "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'" The Court also emphasized the importance of local control over the operation of schools.

How did we get from eighty-five outlying districts to just fifty-three? We don't have the slightest idea, and Hannah-Jones' link doesn't explain.

Would children have gained if the lower court's order had gone into effect? It's possible that children would have gained a great deal! It's also possible that rioting and other acts of mayhem would have ensued region-wide.

Hannah-Jones thinks orders like that were a good idea on the merits. A younger Joe Biden seemed to see that the politics wasn't going to work.

In a recent post, Kevin Drum offered a capsule history of the way the politics of the era played out. We aren't saying his history is perfectly accurate, but Hannah-Jones blows past such points of concern altogether:

DRUM (7/1/19): Let me just make a few points. First, forced busing during the ’70s prompted one of the biggest political backlashes of the past half century. By the end of it, Ronald Reagan was president and Reaganomics dominated America for the next 40 years. This was bad for everyone who wasn’t already rich, and it was especially bad for ethnic minorities.

According to Drum, the politics of this good idea worked out very poorly. Presumably, this is a lie.

Hannah-Jones thinks this era's mandated busing was a good idea on the merits. She may be perfectly right.

That said, we think that false and misleading statements by journalists are a bad idea on the merits. So too with silly, simplified, pleasing fairy tales.

Tomorrow, we'll start supplying the information you didn't receive in the Times. One great way to knock down a lie? Disappear basic facts!

Tomorrow: In the era of "resegregation"....

Our lack of intellectual hygiene is striking!

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2019

Sleazy rumors, plus Law and Order's billionaire perv: For us, yesterday's most remarkable paragraph is the one shown below.

It was written by Andi Zeisler. She was identified by the Washington Post as "the co-founder of Bitch Media."

For reasons which define a serious problem, the Post published a brain-dead essay by Zeisler in yesterday's Outlook section. This was part of the fun:

ZEISLER (7/14/19): Those familiar with Epstein’s social notoriety—he hosted celebrity-packed parties at his Manhattan townhouse, and his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, was informally known as “Orgy Island”—know that both Trump and Clinton are long rumored to have benefited from his sleazy largesse. Gawker began covering Epstein as early as 2006 in part because of his ties to Clinton, regularly referring to him as a “billionaire Bill Clinton pal.” Vicky Ward, who wrote a 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein, has said that Graydon Carter, then editor of the magazine, assigned the profile because Clinton’s trip to Africa aboard the Lolita Express had sparked curiosity about the wealthy financier’s murky background. And a 2011 episode of “Law and Order: SVU” titled “Flight” earned its ripped-from-the-headlines bona fides with a lead character known for being both a “billionaire pervert flying in underage girls for sex” and the buddy of “a former president.”

That was paragraph 6 of an essay in Outlook. It defines a problem which is intellectual and moral, but anthropological too.

The key words in that passage begin with these: "long rumored." Other key words in that passage include these: "Orgy Island" and "Lolita Express."

Also, don't miss the reference to something that Law and Order: SVU once so excitingly did. The exciting TV show aired an episode about a billionaire pervert!

"Orgy Island" and "Lolita Express" were included to get you excited. "Rumored" is there because our species is simply too dumb for this game.

Those words define the way the minds of life forms like Zeisler work. The fact that the Post would publish this dreck defines an existential problem.

The same problem appeared two days earlier in a rancid though typical essay by New York magazine's Frank Rich. As with Zeisler, so with Rich—the grimy old "Butcher of Broadway" was modeling the idea that rumors should be spread about Trump and Clinton both, with total disdain for real facts:

RICH (7/12/19): If you watch Fox News, you will believe that Bill Clinton was Epstein’s No. 1 pal and enabler. If you watch MSNBC, this scandal is usually all about Trump. In fact both presidents are guilty (at the very least) of giving Epstein cover and credibility, though the full extent of their respective exposure, moral and legal, won’t be known unless and until we get many more facts. Certainly the circumstantial evidence is creepy. Unsurprisingly Trump now asserts that he’s “not a fan” of Epstein even though their years-long friendship is profusely documented as far back as the early 1990s, when they were the sole men present at a 1992 “calendar girl competition” that Trump instigated at Mar-a-Lago and where more than two dozen “girls” were flown in. Clinton also appears to be trying to rewrite history. This week he released a statement saying that he had taken just four “trips” on Epstein’s jet even though FAA-mandated flight logs reportedly show that he was present on more than two dozen. In a letter written to prosecutors by two Epstein lawyers, Gerald Lefcourt and the inevitable Alan Dershowitz, in 2007, Epstein was named as a founding donor to the Clinton Global Initiative even though, as Marc Fisher reported in the Washington Post, “his name does not appear in public documents detailing the initiative’s leadership.”...

"The circumstantial evidence is creepy," the creepy fellow says. He has just constructed a sentence which starts with the words "In fact" and ends with the claim that we need to get the facts!

As he proceeds, Rich does the sort of thing he always has done—he toys with chronologies to hand you creepy insinuations about Clinton. Consider some typical examples of sleazy insinuations by Rich:

"In 2007, Epstein was named as a founding donor to the Clinton Global Initiative?"

As Rich notes, Epstein was so "named" in a letter written by Epstein's attorneys! They wrote the letter to federal prosecutors as a character reference as Epstein was on the verge of going down.

There is no particular reason to believe that the claim is accurate in any serious way. With that in mind, there's no reason to find it odd that Epstein's name "does not appear in public documents detailing the initiative’s leadership.” Rich just wants to hand you a thrill through one of his endless manufactured contradictions.

Meanwhile, how about that amazing conflict about the number of trips on Epstein's plane? Rich pretends to be wetting his pants about the way Clinton "appears to be trying to rewrite history" with regard to the number of trips.

In fact, by the time Rich's essay appeared, this contradiction had been explained about ten million times. Clinton claims to have taken four long-distance trips on the Epstein's plane, all long before Epstein's legal problems surfaced. The two dozen entries on the flight logs represent the various legs of those four lengthy trips—or so a million people had said or suggested by the time Rich's essay appeared, with that apparent or possible explanation disappeared.

For reasons Bandy X. Lee might want to explore, Rich has always been like this. For our money, the guild's recent exercise in sliming got its start with one slippery, slimy paragraph in this Michelle Goldberg column. There's only one word for that paragraph:

Slick!

In the end, this is what humans are like. In this age of Clinton/Gore/Clinton, this is what upper-end humans have been like all along.

We know of no evidence that Clinton engaged in deviant behavior with Epstein. Certainly, Zeisler and Rich weren't able to offer any. So they did the best they could.

People like Rich are sadly deranged, and the Washington Post has slid to the point where it decided to publish Zeisler's excited recollections of various rumors she's heard. These are the rules by which the last thirty years have been played. These rules have led us to President Trump—a sick-seeming person, like Rich.

Various things have been rumored! This is something the Washington Post very much wants you to know.

Also, Law and Order: SVU did an episode about a billionaire pervert! And the billionaire pervert was a "buddy" to a former president!

This is the stifling culture of rumor, excitement and sexual thrill. It's the mental world of our "human race" in these, its last few days.

SCHOOLED ON CHARLOTTE: How much can you trust what you read in the Times?

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2019

Charlotte-Mecklenburg's web: On the merits, Nikole Hannah-Jones thinks mandated busing in the 1970s was a good idea.

On the merits, she may be right!

On the politics, Joe Biden apparently thought that mandated busing was a bad idea. It isn't clear that those assessments were, or are, in conflict.

In theory, the world is full of good ideas which aren't politically feasible. That doesn't mean they're bad ideas. It simply means that, within our system, they can't gain sufficient support.

Was court-ordered busing in the 1970s a good idea on the merits but a bad idea on the politics? There's no real way to sort that out at this point in time. Nor is it clearly a good idea to attempt to do so.

But so what? Yesterday, in the New York Times Sunday Review, Hannah-Jones wrote a long, impassioned defense of the idea that mandated busing was a good idea, on the merits, back when crusading politicians were still endorsing such measures.

Perhaps because of the passion involved, Hannah-Jones sometimes almost seemed to be arguing against herself. At one point, for example, she recalled some basic facts which lay at the heart of the famous 1954 Brown decision:

HANNAH-JONES (7/15/19): [W]hile it is true that close-by schools may be convenient, white Americans’ veneration of neighborhood schools has never outweighed their desire to maintain racially homogeneous environments for their children. Few remember that Oliver Brown, a petitioner in Brown v. Board of Education, sued for the right of his daughter, Linda, to attend her neighborhood school. Kansas’ state law allowed school systems to segregate at the behest of white parents, and so the Topeka school board bused Linda and other black children past white schools to preserve segregation. Across the South and in parts of the North, black children were regularly bused long distances across district and county lines, because as late as the 1950s, some local governments valued the education of black children so little and segregation so much that they did not offer a single high school that black students could attend.

If we might borrow from Hannah-Jones' language, "few remember that Oliver Brown" didn't want his daughter bused to a distant school!

More specifically, he didn't want his daughter bused when she could have walked to her "neighborhood school" just seven blocks from the Browns' home!

Alas! Black kids were, in fact, "regularly bused long distances across district and county lines" during the era of dual school systems in states like Mississippi—and even in states like Kansas.

This was one of the downsides of de jure public school segregation, though the Warren Court cited the insult to those childrens' dignity, and the psychological harm thus accrued, as the principal reason why public schools in dual school systems could never be "separate but equal."

("To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone." So said the unanimous Court. No provision of equal facilities could undo that harm, the Court humanely judged.)

Oliver Brown didn't want his daughter bused to a distant school for a range of good reasons. Twenty years later, others may have been less generous in their motivations when they opposed court-ordered busing in other states and regions.

To Hannah-Jones, that court-ordered busing was a good idea on the merits, and she may be perfectly right. That said, it proved to be politically impossible—and in effect, it still is.

That may explain why high-minded crusaders like Candidate Harris have never offered such proposals during their years in public service. In our current nomination campaign, we're perhaps being conned by people like Harris—though, in fairness, it must be said that our campaigns almost always turn on such gong-shows and on such semi-deceptions.

(Anthropologists tell us that this is the best our deeply flawed species was able to do. "It was all in the way their brains were wired," these despondent future experts have said, speaking to us in the past tense from the years after Mister Trump's War.)

At any rate, Hannah-Jones wrote a lengthy, impassioned defense of mandated busing, circa 1975. On the merits, her view may be correct.

On the merits, she may be right! But regarding the politics, Hannah-Jones forgot to tell us why no one proposes such actions today, including the crusading pols who are turning the current campaign into a blast at the past.

It slipped her mind to explain why the impassioned Candidate Booker undertook no such proposals when he revolutionized the Newark schools during his tenure as mayor. Why hasn't Candidate Harris issued a modern-day busing proposal? This too went undiscussed in yesterday's lengthy report.

For ourselves, we were teaching fifth grade in "apartheid schools" during the era in question. Perhaps for that reason, we read Hannah-Jones' report with interest—and we did a bit of a double-take when we read the passage shown below.

In the passage in question, Hannah-Jones discusses the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Schools, the nation's 18th largest school system. Perhaps because of the passion involved, the facts have perhaps been massaged a bit:

HANNAH-JONES: [T]o say busing—or really, mandated desegregation—failed is a lie.

It transformed the South from apartheid to the place where black children are now the most likely to sit in classrooms with white children. It led to increased resources being spent on black and low-income children. There’s a story black people ruefully tell of the day they knew integration was coming to a black high school in Charlotte, N.C.: A crew of workers arrived to fix up the facilities because now white children would be attending. This is how two-way busing worked and why integration was necessary—white people would never allow their children to attend the types of inferior schools to which they relegated black children.

For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

In that passage, Hannah-Jones begins with the rhetorical move of the modern impassioned progressive. Under this heroic regime, any statement with which the writer disagrees must be dismissed as a "lie."

In this case, Hannah-Jones says that the era of mandated desegregation was, in fact, a success. She may be right in that assessment, depending on how you score it.

Hannah-Jones cites Charlotte-Mecklenburg as an example of this success. Along the way, we may perhaps become entangled in a bit of a web.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg engaged in busing in the 1970s and 1980s as the result of a high-profile Supreme Court decision. Let's review what Hannah-Jones says about what happened:

According to Hannah-Jones, "both black and white students saw achievement gains" during the years of court-ordered busing. As her evidence, she links to this 57-page report by the Naep about its Long-Term Trend Assessment program—a report which doesn't include a single word about the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools.

Such "phantom links" are hardly unknown at the Times. Having said that, let's move right along:

As she continues, Hannah-Jones reports that Charlotte-Mecklenburg "is now the most segregated district in North Carolina." Depending on how you measure "segregation," that may or may not be true.

For her source, Hannah-Jones links to this dead-end, two-paragraph news report. Thanks to additional work on our part, the actual study in question can be reviewed right here.

Let's ignore those useless links in the Times report. You'll note that Hannah-Jones tells us nothing about academic achievement in Charlotte-Mecklenburg after the end of court-ordered busing.

We're told there were gains during busing, but the link she offers is a phantom. And uh-oh! Because Charlotte entered the Naep's Trial Urban District Assessment program in 2003, it's easy to measure the system's academic gains in the era of high "segregation."

Hannah-Jones doesn't do so. Instead, she lets us imagine the academic disaster which surely must have ensued.

In our view, it's much better when kids of different "races" and ethnicities go to school together. In our view, it would also be much better if our tribe's assistant, associate and adjunct professors stopped insisting that every person must be said to belong to a "race" and must have his or her "identity" thus defined, full stop.

In our view, kids get a better deal when they go to school with a wide array of classmates. That said, it's also our view that citizens get a better deal when they aren't being conned by crusading political candidates or misled by impassioned journalists.

What has academic progress been like since Charlotte emerged from busing? It's extremely easy to check that out and, by gosh, we did!

You may be surprised by the data—by the simple data you weren't provided in yesterday's New York Times. Those data complicate our world—and our journalism is largely based upon the construction of simplified fictions.

How much can you trust what you read in the Times? On our sprawling and leafy campus, we've been asking that question for years!

Tomorrow: A bit of background

THE WOKE AND THE BUSED: The long and the short of the woke and the bused!

SATURDAY, JULY 13, 2019

Who supports busing today?: How many Democratic "candidates" support federally mandated busing? Given recent pseudo-discussions, The Atlantic decided it had to find out!

In a murky example of modern-day "youth journalism," Godfrey and (Mark) Harris reported that Candidate (Kamala) Harris has been "hedging on the issue" ever since she dramatically raised it several weeks back.

Other hopefuls have been more clear, the pair of reporters said. In the passage shown below, they began calling the roll.

Ten of the twenty-five (!) Democratic candidates (sic) do support federally mandated busing, the Atlantic's reporters said. Correctly or otherwise, they didn't include Candidate Harris on their list of the woke:

GODFREY AND HARRIS (7/10/19): Other 2020 Democratic candidates, though, are more unequivocal on the issue. After reaching out to the campaigns of all 25 Democratic candidates for president, 10 responded that they support federally mandated busing: Warren; Booker; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont; Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas; Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts; Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio; Andrew Yang; Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam; former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska; and former Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania.

There you see the list of the woke. Just for starters, let us say this about that:

Yang, Messam, Gravel and Sestak are "Democratic presidential candidates" in much the same way that we run the Bolshoi Ballet. In theory, this means that the Atlantic found six (6) real or semi-real candidates who do support mandated busing.

That said, the reporters set a rather low bar for inclusion on their list. For example, does Candidate Booker support mandated busing? Earlier in their report, the reporters quoted his campaign saying this:

GODFREY AND HARRIS: [A]t least 10 2020 Democratic candidates do support federally mandated busing as a means of desegregating America’s schools. “If localities are not taking action to desegregate schools, Elizabeth believes the federal government has a constitutional obligation to step in to deliver on the promise of Brown v. Board, including, if necessary, busing,” a spokesperson for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told us. Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, echoed the sentiment. “At a time of increasing segregation of schools, we should consider every tool at our disposal—including busing—to support desegregation and ensure equal opportunity for all kids,” [the Booker spokesperson] said.

"We should consider every tool at our disposal, including busing?"

In all honesty, it's hard to see how that statement differs from the "hedging" the scribes attributed to Candidate Harris. But so what? That fuzzy statement qualified Booker for listing among the woke.

That said, does anyone really support mandated busing of the type Candidate Biden opposed in the 1970s (sic)?

Putting it a different way, has anyone ever proposed any such busing? Would anyone have said one word about mandated busing if Harris hadn't delivered her sneak attack, a prelude to the selling of her $30 "little girl" t-shirts?

Does anyone really support mandated busing? Due to his past service as mayor of Newark, Booker lets us ponder this question in a uniquely specific way.

Again, we direct you to Dale Russakoff's well-received 2015 book, The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools? In her book, Russakoff chronicles the chaotic attempt by Mayor Booker to join hands with Governor Christie and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to transform the Newark Public Schools, which were under state control at that time.

In our view, Booker's massive cluelessness is the star of Russakoff's superbly non-partisan book. However well-intentioned he may have been, Booker seemed to have had no idea of the difficulty and the scope of the task he was attempting.

As far as we know, no one currently claims that Booker actually "turn[ed] Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation," a miracle he crazily claimed he could achieve within the space of five years.

It's also true that busing for the purpose of diversification is never mentioned in Russakoff's book, not even once! There's no sign that Booker ever suggested any such thing, despite his alleged support for the high-minded practice today.

In many ways, Newark would have been a perfect candidate for mandated busing of the type Biden opposed. As we speak, the district lists its student population like this:

Newark, N.J. Public Schools
Student enrollment, 2019
White kids: 8.4%
Black kids: 42.9%
Hispanic kids: 47.2%

Based upon those data, the typical Newark public school is "intensely segregated" today. But how great! Newark is the county seat of Essex County, whose relatively small area (130 square miles) contains a substantial number of boroughs and townships which are heavily white.

The Newark schools are perfect for busing! Consider the nearby borough of North Caldwell (population 6200):

According to the leading authority on the hamlet, North Caldwell has been listed as the third best place to live in New Jersey, and also as the 34th richest town in the United States!

Its schools are highly rated. Even better, their demographics seem ripe for diversification:

North Caldwell, N.J. Public Schools
Student enrollment, 2019
White kids: 90.1%
Black kids: 1%
Hispanic kids: 4.1%

An array of such hamlets exists within compact Essex County, whose overall population is roughly evenly divided on a black-white racial basis.

As such, this compact county would have been a dream for mandated busing! But Russakoff mention no such proposal at any point in her book, in which a stunningly clueless Mayor Booker pursues an absurdly impossible dream along with a know-nothing gaggle of equally clueless favorite disciples and friends.

Newark's public schools remain "intensely segregated" today. That said, no one is going to ask Candidate Booker why he says he supports mandated busing when he doesn't seem to have proposed any such action back when he was in charge.

That's because no one actually cares about this. This whole "discussion" has been a scam designed for political ends.

The woke have been discussing the bused. A few of the hopefuls are even saying they care.

In the process, the gullible get carted away. Then again, "Consider the species," as an array of top experts have said.

("This species was wired for conduct like this," despondent future anthropologists have told us again and again.)

No one was ever going to suggest that the hamlets and boroughs of Essex County share their schools with Newark's kids! One candidate doesn't seem to have supported or proposed that approach back then, and no matter how "hurtful" Biden's statements have been, that high-minded candidate isn't proposing such actions today.

In saying this, we don't mean to offer a judgment about the actual merits of mandated busing. Instead, we offer a judgment about the conduct of the woke and the bused, along with the fate of the played.

In the current pseudo-debate, busing has served as a way to get there. In truth, none of the hopefuls support such a practice, and none of them ever will.

Newark's schools today: How well are Newark's schools performing today?

We hope they're performing well. But because the city has never taken part in the Naep's Trial Urban District Assessment, there's no real way to compare Newark's schools with those in other big cities.

New Orleans has never taken part in the TUDA either. When "reform"-minded districts avoid this assessment, we're inclined, rightly or wrongly, to mark them down several grades.

THE LONG AND THE SHORT: American kids have made large gains!

FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2019

Until you read The Atlantic (The Short): As we noted yesterday, Miriam Jordan has presented a profile of the Lake Worth, Florida public schools which is deeply humane and intelligent.

Her report concerns the challenges which may be faced by public schools with lots of immigrant kids.

Jordan's intelligent, humane report appeared in Wednesday's New York Times! Setting that major surprise to the side, we'd consider quibbling with one part of this passage:

JORDAN (7/10/19): South Grade Elementary illustrates the challenges. There are children like 8-year-old Sherly Perez, who crossed the border with her father and lives in a room at her aunt’s house. One child lives with 10 other people in a house with just one bathroom. Some fourth and fifth graders have been suicidal and depressed, school officials say.

A quarter of the children last year who enrolled at the school in third grade, the grade during which the state tests student progress in reading and math, were newcomers. Only 11 percent of kindergartners were assessed as “kindergarten ready” when they started school.

Dayvin Mungia, the second grader who had never attended school, was one of several students who were taught numbers and letters on the side by his teacher when the rest of the class was engaged in other activities.

Ms. Arce-Gonzalez decided it was vital to offer year-round instruction if children were to have any hope of catching up...

Jordan refers to Ana Arce-Gonzalez, "the principal at South Grade Elementary School in the heart of Lake Worth’s immigrant enclave."

Arce-Gonzalez is one of the "righteous Gentiles" portrayed by Jordan is her deeply humane piece. In Jordan's portrayal, Arce-Gonzalez is working around the clock to help these deserving kids who have recently arrived from the south.

Having said that, we will also say this:

Depending on what we mean by the term, it isn't likely that kids who start so far behind will ever be "catching up."

Will Dayvin Mungia, 7 years old, ever "catch up" to our national norms? Will he ever "catch up" to the native-born Florida kids who will score near the top of the SAT/ACT charts when they finish high school?

The odds suggest that he won't. This helps explain this basic set of Naep data:

Scores by percentile, American public schools
Grade 8 math, Naep, 2017
90th percentile: 332.44
75th percentile: 308.90
50th percentile: 281.67
25th percentile: 255.01
10th percentile: 232.10

Let's make sure we understand what those statistics mean:

On the most recent Naep math test, ten percent of the nation's eighth-graders scored above 332. But on the same test, ten percent of their classmates scored below 232!

Almost surely, those numbers define an enormous "achievement gap." The gap is so large that standard "rules of thumb" break down if we attempt to quantify the size of the gap.

In short, our nation's eighth-graders are not all alike. They can't all be taught the same "eighth-grade math," with a bit of extra help for those who are lagging a bit behind.

Those data define a basic reality found in our public schools—but so do the data shown below. These data describe the gains, not the gaps:

Gains in average scores, 1996-2017
American public schools, Grade 8 math, Naep
White kids: 12.66 points
Black kids: 20.32 points
Hispanic kids: 19.31 points
Asian-American kids: 22.06 points (2000-2017)

The gaps on the Naep are huge. But the gains have also been very large. Consider Hispanic kids:

Applying a standard though very rough rule of thumb, Hispanic kids outperformed their forerunners by almost two academic years over the course of the 21 years encompassed by those data.

Those overall gains were being recorded even as schools were being challenged by deserving kids like Dayvin Mungia. Or by traumatized kids like Jakelin Raquek, just 4 years old, who "was making steady progress in her pre-K class until her father was arrested by immigration agents in front of her, and later deported."

Or by the child in Jackson, Wyoming who "constantly cried, worrying that his grandmother was going to be killed back in El Salvador and that he would never see his parents again." Those test scores rose in the manner described even as our public schools dealt with challenges like these.

What explains these various data, in which the gaps and the gains are both quite large? We have no idea! Our most lordly newspaper, the New York Times, assigns its public school reporting to vastly over-privileged children of the New York Times/Columbia class. They peddle their pleasing tribal fairy tales and commit journalistic scams.

They hand you dreck from the realm of the dream or the tale. Then too, we have The Atlantic, which doesn't seem able to quit scripting of the type shown below, gloomy headlines included:

WEXLER (8/19): Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong/In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids.

[...]

As far back as 1977, early-elementary teachers spent more than twice as much time on reading as on science and social studies combined. But since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made standardized reading and math scores the yardstick for measuring progress, the time devoted to both subjects has only grown. In turn, the amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted—especially in schools where test scores are low.

And yet, despite the enormous expenditure of time and resources on reading, American children haven’t become better readers. For the past 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at or above the “proficient” level on national tests. For low-income and minority kids, the picture is especially bleak: Their average test scores are far below those of their more affluent, largely white peers—a phenomenon usually referred to as the achievement gap...

Is that gloomy headline accurate? Is it true that elementary education has "gone terribly wrong?"

That top headline is a throwback to the era of "education reform." During that era, every know-nothing journalistic halfwit recited this dystopian claim.

In this way, they pleased the nation's big-bucks "education reformers," while blowing past the basic educational data they'd neither reviewed nor surveyed. Most important of all by far, They Said What Everyone Else Did.

(To all intents and purposes, everyone agrees that the Naep is our one reliable domestic source of educational data. Everybody praises the Naep, but nobody seems to look at its data! For all Naep data, start here.)

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong! It's hard to square that familiar, wonderfully gloomy claim with the Naep data posted above, but The Atlantic can't seem to quit this familiar old story-line.

The magazine also can't seem to quit Natalie Wexler, a former lawyer they drag out, every now and again, to repeat her gloomy claims.

In fairness to Wexler, she focuses on reading instruction, where the gains have been less large than in math. She may have perfectly sensible things to say about reading instruction.

But is it true, what The Atlantic has (once again) said? Is it true that American children "haven’t become better readers" over the past 42, 18 or 20 years?

Is it true that "Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong?"

As noted, the recorded gains in reading haven't matched those in math. If we're not mistaken, reading has proven to be "harder to teach" than math all around the world.

That doesn't mean that there have been no gains in reading at all. Here are the score gains on the Naep over the most recent measured 19-year span (the Naep tested math in 1996, reading in 1998):

Gains in average scores, 1998-2017
American public schools, Grade 8 reading, Naep
White kids: 5.49 points
Black kids: 6.35 points
Hispanic kids: 13.17 points
Asian-American kids: 16.08 points

Have Hispanic kids recorded no gains in reading? According to that standard, very rough rule of thumb, they gained more than one academic year, on average, over the course of those years.

They did so even as public schools dealt with challenges of the type described in Jordan's humane report.

That said, leave it to The Atlantic! "Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong," this venerable journal has once again pseudo-reported.

The conclusion we draw seems blindingly obvious:

At The Atlantic, as at The Times, no one cares about any of this, and no one ever has!

Still coming: More on our nation's (academic/journalistic) achievement gap, courtesy of Kevin Drum.

(Drum: "I feel like this stuff is manufactured in an underground factory somewhere and shipped out randomly to newspapers across the country." In this case, it was shipped from Harvard to yesterday's New York Times!)

No, we still can't explain the phenomena Drum describes in that post.

THE LONG AND THE SHORT: Challenges in the Lake Worth schools!

THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2019

Jordan gets it right (The Long): On a remarkably regular basis, the New York Times produces the worst education reporting found on the face of the earth.

According to the paper's well-bred reporters, the nation's giant achievement gaps are all the result of test prep! And not only that:

If we could only "desegregate" Gotham's schools, the children would all be well above average! Just like in Lake Wobegon!

Such heinous work is built around the need for performative virtue. After such fantastical demonstrations, it's off to the Hamptons for a weekend of play among the finer set!

So it goes, year after year, in the New York Times. Imagine, then, our surprise when we read Miriam Jordan's superlative profile of the Lake Worth, Florida public schools on the front page of yesterday's National section.

Jordan is a "national immigration reporter" for the Times. She came to the paper in May 2017 after years of experience covering immigration issues for the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, Jordan's report described the "challenges" public school systems may face when confronted with waves of immigrant kids. The report was deeply human and deeply humane, and intelligent to boot.

Jordan began as shown below. We include the hard-copy headlines:

JORDAN (7/10/19): Engulfed by Migrant Children, and Straining to Teach Them/
School districts across the country take on language barriers, illiteracy and traumas to educate newcomers.

LAKE WORTH, Fla.—Dayvin Mungia, 7, arrived from El Salvador at South Grade Elementary in South Florida last year with, it seemed, no schooling at all. “He didn’t even recognize the first letter of his name,” said Nicol Sakellarios, his second-grade teacher, as the smiling boy gamely stumbled through his ABC’s in summer school not long ago. “Good job, my love,” she said, prodding him on as he faltered again and again.

Dayvin Mungia is seven years old. A photograph of the beautiful child provides the famous thousand words. He sits with Sakellarios, his second-grade teacher, as she gently prods him.

Jordan focuses on Lake Worth, a long-time haven for immigrants from Guatemala. According to Jordan, "spiraling violence and an unforgiving drought that has driven subsistence farmers off their land back home has caused a surge in departures [from Guatemala] in the last two years."

That recent surge in new arrivals has produced challenges within the Lake Worth schools. For starters, consider this:

JORDAN: Last year, the Palm Beach County school district enrolled 4,555 Guatemalan students in K through 12, nearly 50 percent more than two years earlier. Many of the students come from the country’s remote highlands and speak neither Spanish nor English. The number of elementary school students in K through 5 more than doubled to 2,119 in that same period.

[...]

Critics say immigrant students could do better if the district provided more support, including hiring more interpreters. But district officials say it has been tough to hire speakers of Mayan languages, such as Q’anjob’al and Mam, whose educational qualifications fulfill state requirements. Currently, only four interpreters make the rounds of the entire district.

Dayvin Mungia, age 7, is one of the students in question. That said, the challenges facing Lake Worth's public schools extend beyond issues of language.

Trauma poses challenges too. In this passage, Jordan describes a situation at Munger Mountain Elementary, way off in the mountain west:

JORDAN: Nearly half of the books at the library in the Munger Mountain Elementary school in Jackson, Wyo., are in Spanish, where the immigrant population has ballooned in recent years. The school has recently begun offering all instruction in both English and Spanish

Scott Eastman, the principal, said that students do not just arrive with learning deficiencies. One child had been separated from his family, and was so traumatized he didn’t speak for weeks. “He constantly cried, worrying that his grandmother was going to be killed back in El Salvador and that he would never see his parents again,” Mr. Eastman said.

He feared his grandmother would be killed! Traumatizations of that type offer challenges too. Later, Jordan returned to Lake Worth to describe a similar situation:

JORDAN: “The constant state of anxiety creates toxic stress for every member of the family,” said Amanda Escobar, who leads the team of early-learning specialists from the Guatemalan-Maya Center. “The kids don’t feel safe and secure.”

Jakelin Raquek, 4, was making steady progress in her pre-K class until her father was arrested by immigration agents in front of her, and later deported. “She was getting sassy in English,” said her teacher, Magda Arguelles. After the episode, she said, the little girl fell apart. “We were never able to get her back into learning mode.”

Jakelin Raquek is only 4! Before she saw her father arrested, she'd been making steady progress.

These are among the realities which exist in American schools. Back to Lake Worth, more specifically to South Grade Elementary:

According to Jordan's report, a quarter of the children enrolled at the school in third grade last year "were newcomers. Only 11 percent of kindergartners were assessed as 'kindergarten ready' when they started school.

"Dayvin Mungia, the second grader who had never attended school, was one of several students who were taught numbers and letters on the side by his teacher when the rest of the class was engaged in other activities," Jordan wrote.

Technically, those are educational issues. According to Jordan's report, South Grade Elementary is working with emotional issues too:

"Some fourth and fifth graders have been suicidal and depressed, school officials say." These are among the important realities found in our public schools.

We were startled to encounter the real world of actual public schools in yesterday's New York Times. Much more often, the paper constructs a phantasmagoric twilight zone when it lets its overprivileged "education reporters" wax about the imagined state of their imagined public school worlds.

New York Times public school reporting is routinely fantasy-based. Jordan's piece was not. It was intelligent and deeply humane.

Jordan described the types of challenges which exist in the nation's public schools, even in New York City. The specific challenges she was describing involve the lives of immigrant kids, but other challenges involve the native born.

And no, it isn't all test prep, the lunatic claim the toffs at the Times keep handing to their gullible readers. Based upon data from all across the nation, it's barely test prep at all.

One last point about Jordan's superb report. Her humanity extends to native-born citizens of Lake Worth, some of whom may leave the school district when their own kids come of age.

Below, you see the way Jordan's report ends. All the people quoted here are offering reasonable assessments, though one respondent may be working a bit too hard at being "incorrect:"

JORDAN: Many Lake Worth residents have welcomed the diversity brought by the city’s now numerous immigrants, but some also worry that they could be dragging down educational standards for other students.

“You have to be experiencing real hardship to carry your toddler through the desert to seek a better life,” said Dan Brown, a mail carrier, who said the new immigrants are “perfectly fine neighbors,” but who also said he was considering moving to a place with less-impacted schools when his 2-year-old son is ready for kindergarten.

Some other residents wondered whether they were subsidizing the newly arriving families.

“They’re poor and can’t make it here,” said Jonathan Harris, a real-estate investor who favors stronger controls on immigration. “I am pretty confident that we have enough people already here illegally to do all the jobs that Americans don’t want to get their hands dirty doing,” he said.

But Kim Lingle, a paralegal who has lived for years in Lake Worth, said the new families have been an asset. “The immigrants are loving, caring, hard-working families,” she said. “They contribute to the fabric of our kitschy little campy town.”

Is it possible? Is it possible that the challenges described in Jordan's report are "dragging down educational standards for other students" in some way?

Well yes, of course it is!

In some sense or other, are long-time residents of Lake Worth "subsidizing the newly arriving families?"

Well yes, almost surely they are!

Will Brown be proving that he's a racist, or a xenophobe, possibly even a deplorable, if he moves "to a place with less-impacted schools?"

The toffs of the Times like to tell us such tales! They prepped at Dalton, then went to Columbia, and are happy to call out The Very Bad People who animate their novelized presentations.

Jordan's report was full of real life. Real life is rarely allowed to intrude on reports about public schools in the New York Times.

At the Times, the kids are all above average. That said, the Asian kids are stealing everyone else's seats through their reliance on test prep, for which they paid thousands of dollars.

We were amazed by Jordan's humane dispatch from the real world. Tomorrow, still in the public school realm, The Atlantic just can't seem to quit a certain gloomy claim.

Tomorrow: The Short

BREAKING: Jury duty today!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2019

Service resumes today: We're off for a session of jury duty. Service resumes tomorrow.

THE WOKE AND THE BUSED: Still no explanation from Harris!

TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2019

Protected by Gardol shield: Several weeks later, the question lingers, though it's largely unasked:

Was mandated busing a good idea in 1973? If so, not support it today?

In a slightly more rational world, the question would go to Candidate Harris, since she's the one who raised this question during the first Democratic "debates."

That said, we live in a tribal, not a rational, world. According to major anthropologists familiar with this non-dispute dispute, Harris is being swathed in layers of privilege—layers of privilege designed to keep current tribal "fictions" alive.

"This is simply the way the human brain worked," these forlorn future experts have said, speaking in the past tense.

According to these future experts, Candidate Harris should have been pushed much harder on the basic question we've posed. This is why they've said this:

Harris has made the mandated claim according to which public school segregation is worse today than it was in the past.

If that's so, why doesn't she propose large-scale federally mandated busing to address the situation? If Biden should have supported the practice back then, why isn't she proposing the practice today?

By the end of last week, it was clear that Harris was having a whole lot of trouble answering that basic question. The humor came when mainstream journalists worked to protect her from this problem, thereby keeping themselves in line with narratives and novelizations preferred by the tribe and the guild.

We've been describing this process of novelization for more than twenty years. That said, nothing stops our misfiring species from telling the stories it likes.

A protective shield has been built around Harris. We offer three examples:

Ella Nilson in Vox:

We chuckled when youngish Ella Nilson (UNH, class of 2013) tried to handle this topic for Vox.

Presumably, Nilson's salary is low; this helps Vox survive. On the downside, young liberals are handed remarkably murky "journalism" which appears beneath headlines like these:

Kamala Harris is fielding questions about her stance on federally mandated busing
Harris says federally mandated busing was needed in the 1970s but is rarely needed today.

How strange! If public school segregation is worse today than it was in the past, why wouldn't federally mandated busing be a good idea today? Nilson's bow to tribal verities started out like this:

NILSON (7/5/19): Kamala Harris and Joe Biden aren’t done sorting out the fallout from her lightning rod moment at last week’s Democratic debate, when the senator criticized the former vice president for his record on school busing.

The attack sent Biden reeling and solidified Harris’s ascent into the 2020 presidential field’s top tier. Harris successfully portrayed Biden as out of touch with the current Democratic Party, but after her viral moment, she is also being asked to go on the record about how she would handle busing in the current era.

At a recent campaign event in Iowa, Harris said that while federally mandated busing was necessary to integrate schools in the 1960s and ’70s, she didn’t think it was necessary now, because she no longer sees state or local opposition to integration. In fact, she said she believed it was a decision that should be left up to local school districts and municipalities, rather than the federal government.

“I think of busing as being in the toolbox of what is available and what can be used for the goal of desegregating America’s schools,” Harris said. “I believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district.”

According to Nilson, Candidate Harris' lightning rod moment sent Candidate Biden reeling and solidified Harris' ascent! And not only that—Harris had "successfully portrayed Biden as out of touch with the current Democratic Party," the youngish scribe murkily said.

Why then isn't Candidate Harris proposing mandated busing? Swaddling Harris in a type of "Gardol shield," the youngish reporter ended up saying this:

NILSON: Segregation and busing are not nearly as big an issue today as they were in the middle of the civil rights era (although there’s data to suggest progress on desegregation has actually stalled in recent years).

But as Vox’s P.R. Lockhart wrote, “These critiques of Biden are clearly intended to make a broader point: that the former vice president, in continuing to defend his stance on busing, is out of step with the current Democratic electorate on issues of race and fighting racism. And that could be an issue for many of the black voters Biden is counting on for support.”

There! According to Nilson, segregation and busing aren't nearly as big an issue today!

In some way, is that supposed to explain why Candidate Harris proposes no large-scale busing, even though Biden should have supported it in 1973? Nilson went on to quote the even younger P. J. Lockhardt (Duke 2014), who offered a thoroughly murky statement designed to quell further discussion:

By defending his anti-busing stance, Biden is out of step with the current party electorate!

So this woke youngster is said to have said. But since Harris also seems to oppose mandated busing, why isn't she out of step with the electorate too?

Nilson never quite addresses that point. Along the way, she says this: "there’s data to suggest progress on desegregation has actually stalled in recent years."

In fact, Harris has said that public school desegregation is worse than it was in the past. Vox readers were spared from learning this fact, perhaps because it undermines the protective swaddling of the demagogue, the current tribal line.

Is Ezra Klein still in charge of this site? Its product is quit poor, though in that sense quite human.

Judy and the geriatrics:

In fairness, Nilson ends up saying that Harris needs to explain her position. No such suggestion was offered that evening on The PBS NewsHour.

Judy Woodruff invited Brooks and Tumulty to discuss the Biden-Harris non-dispute dispute. (This was the standard Friday night "Brooks and Shields" discussion segment, with Karen Tumulty subbing for Mark Shields.)

By now, it had been clear for several days that Harris was having a hard time explaining her own position on large-scale mandated busing.

That said, so what? In the course of a fairly lengthy discussion, Harris' problem went unmentioned on The NewsHour—but every crime in Oklahoma was added to Biden's name! To watch the segment or read the transcript, you can just click here.

Balz maintains narrative too:

The younger scribes were weak at Vox, but how about the aging mainstream authority figures—the ones who sent Candidate Gore to the ovens during a twenty-month war in 1999 and 2000?

Judy Woodruff was part of that gang. To a lesser extent, so was the Washington Post's Dan Balz. Below, you see the way the seasoned charioteer struggled to Keep Script Alive in Sunday's print editions:

BALZ (7/7/19): In the debate, Harris talked about herself as a beneficiary of school busing as a child and attacked Biden’s past position. She has since made clear that, while she believes busing should be available as a tool for local school districts dealing with issues of integration, she does not favor busing mandated by the federal government.

To which the Biden forces ask: Well then, why was she criticizing the former vice president for opposing mandatory busing in his state of Delaware back in the early 1970s when he was a young senator? What was that attack about if the two currently share the same position on mandated busing? To which the Harris camp responds: The real issue is whether Biden regrets “working with segregationists against busing in the 1970s.” Does he have any regrets about the position he took then?

[...]

Harris is the embodiment of a new generation of Democrats, especially those of color, who see the world differently than those of Biden’s generation and will judge him through a different lens. To them, his position on busing in the 1970s was wrong, and on the wrong side of history, regardless of what people think about the use of busing in school districts today.

You seem to get two different choices there:

Biden had the right position in the 1970s, but he was agreeing with the wrong people!

Or:

Biden's position on busing was wrong back then, and who cares what a "Democrat of color" says about this topic today? Such Dems will be "judged through a different lens!" In short, there are two different standards at play!

The anthropologists with whom we consult report to us from the years which follow the global conflagration they refer to as Mister Trump's War.

"This is the way we got to that war," these disconsolate scholars despondently say. "Within this hapless, misfiring species, different candidates were constantly 'judged through a different lens.' "

According to these future analysts, Candidate Harris is being swaddled in privilege by both the tribe and the guild. In effect, she's being protected by a modern-day "Gardol shield."

Why doesn't Harris propose mandated busing? Tons of gorilla dust have appeared, keeping that question obscured.

According to our future experts, the tribe and the guild are struggling hard to disappear a forbidden fact:

Dems of color can be demagogic too! Just like everyone else!