Boston schools have eliminated educational courses that are designed for advanced students because not enough black students are admitted to the program. This is the basic flaw with socialism- it seeks to achieve equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

The students who are seeking to enter the program took a standardized test in the third grade, earned a high score, and won an open spot via lottery. Even with that, the rate of black students that entered the program was far below that of white and Asian students.

Many studies have shown that black students do poorly on standardized tests and on intelligence tests. As a result, researchers have concluded that the tests have racial, cultural, and socio-economic bias built in. There is no evidence of this claimed bias, aside from the results. The conclusions of these researchers ignore an obvious, alternative conclusion: that some races and cultures are less intelligent or place less value upon education, which results in the disparate scores.

My guess is that this is not because blacks are inherently inferior or less intelligent than whites, but that the black culture itself places little value on intelligence or on education. There is research that even supports this. When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their pre-adolescent test scores rise dramatically. These adoptees’ scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this could easily be because their social and cultural environment places them into social circles with other black teenagers.

The whole point of desegregating the schools was to place black students into classrooms with white students, with the belief that black test scores have not risen. Instead, the white/black gap has shrunk, mostly through white students losing ground as they began to adopt the “hip hop” culture.

No matter what the cause, eliminating the advanced classes in order to put the advanced students in with the underperforming students will create equal results, but that only means results will be equally poor.

There you have the essence of socialism: as long as everyone has the same outcome, it doesn’t matter how poor that outcome is. Welcome to education in a socialist environment.

Categories: Education