How Really to be an Antiracist
City Journal | Kay S. Hymowitz
What do the “antiracist” pedagogic groups such as BLM at School, Learning for Justice, Teaching People’s History (Zinn Project), the Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide and the 1619 Project curriculum all have in common? “They start with an impossible premise: that the students of these recommended texts actually know how to read.”
Hymowitz argues that a true “antiracist educator” would teach kids to read. “The tragedy [of illiteracy] for black children and their families, as well as a nation trying to reckon with racial disparities rooted in its own history, can’t be overstated.”
How bad is it? “As of 2019… according to (NAEP)… 35% of fourth-graders were reading at or above proficiency levels; i.e. strong majority—65%…were less than proficient… 34% were reading…below a basic level… [With 8th graders], 34% of them are proficient; 27% were below-basic readers… [and] represent a decline from 2017 for 31states… Nationwide, 52% of black children read below basic in fourth grade…The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cities are so low that they flirt with zero…”
“In Baltimore, where 80% of the student body is black, 61% of these students are below basic; only 9% of fourth-graders and 10% of eighth-graders are reading proficiently… Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourth-grade reading scores; only 5% of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)…”
“If you want to make sense of racial gaps in high school achievement, college attendance, graduation, adult income, and even incarceration, you could do worse than look at third-grade reading scores. Three-quarters of below-proficient readers in third grade remain below proficient in high school… All future academic learning in humanities, social sciences, business, and, yes, STEM fields depends on confident, skilled reading…”
And what about detainees looking ahead to earn their GED or employment? “Over 70 percent of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth-grade level.”
What would the “antiracist” educators say about reading levels? “Social-justice educators would doubtless object that the catastrophic literacy rates of black students are solid proof of the structural racism and teacher bias that they’re intent on fighting… But evidence that racial disadvantage should not be an obstacle to literacy… Nearly 60 percent of black children in New York City charter schools read proficiently; that’s true for only 35% of those in district schools. (And 80% of the kids in New York City charters are economically disadvantaged.) Unless someone can prove that district teachers are more racist than those at charters—an unlikely theory—it would seem that charters simply do a better job of teaching kids to read…”
“The reading emergency should be the primary focus for educators, especially those in a position to help black children. Yet a growing number of school districts are interviewing prospective teachers, even those for elementary school, fixated on one question: ‘What have you done personally or professionally to be more antiracist?’ The best answer to that question would be: ‘Teach black children how to read’…”
Related:
How I Taught My Kid to Read (FAIR Advisor John McWhorter, Atlantic, 2019)
