A topic I used to write about a lot was education, more specifically crapping on public schools and advocating for homeschooling. I don’t write much about it these days as my youngest kids are about to age out of the “school age” category and education is a lost cause in America. I got to thinking about it again this weekend and how absurdly upside-down our view of education has become in America.
“Good schools” has long been code for a school district having a crappy basketball team. Way back, probably through the 1970s, if a White prospective home buying couple was talking to their realtor about houses to look at, the realtor could still say “Oh, you don’t want to live in neighborhood X, it is full of niggers. You should look at neighborhood Y, a nice White neighborhood”. As time went on and political correctness started to take hold, we started talking about “good neighborhoods” versus “bad neighborhoods” but the basic gist was the same. People with the means to do so avoided neighborhoods with blacks, correctly assuming that a neighborhood with even a few blacks would often very quickly turn into one with lots of blacks, and that meant plummeting property values in response to skyrocketing crime. In the Current Day, saying something like “that is a bad neighborhood” isn’t really allowed because it (correctly) declares diverse neighborhoods to be inherently flawed and as we all know, diversity is our greatest strength.
That doesn’t mean that realtors don’t understand that people want to avoid black neighborhoods, just look at where famous liberals, black and White, choose to live. They needed a new way to signal to their clients that a neighborhood is safe and will maintain property values, in other words mostly White and East Asian. The solution? Talking about “good schools”. That helps to avoid the race issue, because who doesn’t love a good school district, while very clearly talking about race in a socially acceptable signal.
For example, let’s look at my high school alma mater, Anthony Wayne High School in Whitehouse, Ohio. According to US News & World Report the district is a good one with very high levels of test proficiency.
Anthony Wayne is ranked the 5th best high school in the Toledo area and the 103rd best high school in the state of Ohio. You will be delighted to learn that Anthony Wayne is a very diverse school district. Just kidding!
AW has a higher percentage of Asian students than black students and almost no mestizo students.
Now let’s look at a local Toledo school. I picked Scott High because I am a little familiar with the school, we used to scrimmage them in football and their team even back then was black as the ace of spades. They had decent sports teams but academically? Not so much.
Yikes. 3% math proficiency? Scott as you might imagine is a little more dusky-hued than Anthony Wayne….
Well, the liberal do-gooder would say. Obviously Anthony Wayne is a more affluent school district and has more money to spend on their school. I assumed going into this exercise that Anthony Wayne would spend more per pupil than Scott. Let’s see if I was right. First Anthony Wayne from the official Ohio School Reports site run by the state.
Now let’s look at Scott High…
Jesup W. Scott High School spends above the state average per pupil and almost $2000 more per pupil than Anthony Wayne. Yet Anthony Wayne students are far smarter and more accomplished. How can this be?
We are told that the key to a “good education” is the quality of the school and the quality of the school district is directly downstream from the funding levels of that school district. So when a school district is a steaming pile of dog shit, the problem is that they simply aren’t getting enough money. As we can see from this very limited example, that is a load of crap. What makes a “good school” actually has very little (but not nothing) to do with spending. Here is the hierarchy for what makes a good student and by extension a good student body.
Genetics: Just like you can never spend enough in personal trainers to get me to dunk a basketball, you also cannot teach people past their genetic ability. IQ isn’t a sufficient quality to make a good student but it is a necessary component.
Parents: I cannot overemphasize how what an incredible head-start I had as a student by my mom teaching me to read proficiently well before I started kindergarten, in fact it was more than enough to allow me to coast through high school and college. Of course getting back to my first bullet point, my mom was able to teach me to read because I had the raw intelligence to learn to read when I was 4.
Engaged Teachers: Just as a good coach can bring out the best in an athlete, good teachers can bring out the best in their students but again, the best coach in the world cannot turn an unathletic person into a world-class athlete, they can only move the needle. Plenty of idealistic, dedicated young teachers go to inner-city schools thinking they can make a difference because they saw somebody in a movie doing it only to find that once they get there….they cannot.
A Culture That Values Education: Just because a school has very few black students doesn’t mean it will perform well. The last school my kids attended was overwhelmingly White but the kids were from low achieving, low motivation families. My kids, especially my eldest daughters who were in 7th and 3rd grade, were bullied because they would raise their hand in class to answer questions. We pulled them from that school and never looked back. Even still, the students at the school in question score right at the state average in math and reading. Look at black “culture”. In black culture, being a good student is seen as “acting White” and aggressively and often violently discouraged.
The Physical School And Infrastructure: Last and least, the things you get by spending more money on schools. Having a nice school is….nice but it is not necessary. We didn’t have a fancy school when I was at Anthony Wayne, no air conditioning in the classrooms, our school was kind of old, our athletic facilities were shit. We also had a small administration compared to school districts now that have enormous staffs that never teach a single student. Sure you can pay your teachers more but for many teachers, especially young women, there isn’t enough money in the world to offset the chance of getting pummeled by an urban scholar.
If Scott High School in Toledo spent $50,000 per pupil, it would barely move the needle on performance because the core foundations to make good students isn’t there, not in genetics and not in culture, which is itself downstream from genetics.
This is another example of people believing something that they have been told endlessly, that poor school performance is tied to insufficient funding, when the truth is that many of the worst schools in America also have some of the highest per pupil funding levels. The problem is not insufficient funds but poor genetics that in turn lead to crappy parents, a culture that rejects education and violence that drives away the best teachers.
As American schools rapidly change demographically, performance has necessarily suffered and even endlessly cranking up spending levels hasn’t fixed the problem, it really hasn’t even slowed the decline. From Reason Magazine:
Far from “defunding” public schools, we are funding them at ridiculous levels and getting diminishing return for those dollars spent. As the author of the above article points out, the money we spend isn’t even getting to the classroom, emphasis mine:
The false claims consistently purport that we spend less than we actually do. In that sense, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many people believe that we have “been defunding education for years.” And if the public believes America spends less on education, they will be misled to push policymakers to throw more money at the problem without fixing real systemic issues.
One of the main issues with this approach is that too few dollars actually make it into the classroom.
Benjamin Scafidi’s seminal report, Back to the Staffing Surge, outlines that the problem with K-12 education funding in America today isn’t the overall amount of dollars going into government schools, but how those dollars are allocated by school districts. Surges in staffing and administrative bloat have become the norm across the country. From 1950 to 2009, student populations increased by 96%, while non-teaching staff increased by a whopping 702%.
From a few secretaries and maintenance staff to enormous bureaucracies, school districts have become bloated and inefficient with dozens or hundreds of staff who don’t actually do any teaching.
America’s public schools are failing but the problem is not a lack of funding, the problem is genetic and given that the majority of young “Americans” are non-White, it is a problem that is going to get a lot worse very soon.