It has been more than 20 years since the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted, which aims to hold schools accountable for educating all children. Before the law was passed, schools gave test scores to all students in a grade, a practice that often obscured the reality that there was an achievement gap between white students and their black and Latino peers.
Those gaps were alarmingly wide, especially for black students. For all the problems with No Child Left Behind, and there were many, at least it ushered in an era of raising awareness about how many students urgently needed help and put pressure on schools to do more for students who had been neglected. for their schools.
That's why it's disappointing that a real effort to narrow the gap—the Los Angeles Unified School District's Black Student Achievement Plan—was challenged as racist in a federal civil rights complaint filed by a conservative group in Virginia. The achievement plan provides funding for additional counselors and improved curriculum for schools with large percentages of black students.
Given the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling banning the use of affirmative action in college admissions, LAUSD officials could have eliminated the $120 million-a-year program in response to the lawsuit. Instead, the district eliminated any racial preferences, expanding the program to help a broader group of underserved students, but ultimately reducing resources for black students, who make up 7% of the student population.
The decision was convenient and got the case dismissed, but Los Angeles Unified should have fought harder to keep the program as it was. If schools are not going to put special effort and funding into improving the performance of black students, what are all those demographic breakdowns by race, which districts must collect and report publicly, intended to accomplish? It's hard to avoid the impression that the group filing the complaint, Parents Defending Education, is okay with criticizing black students' lower scores but doesn't want anything done about it.
There are reasons to defend the program, even in California, which prohibits affirmative action in the public sector. John Affeldt, managing attorney at the nonprofit civil rights legal group Public Advocates, said government agencies are constitutionally authorized to use “race-conscious remedies” to compensate for past racial discrimination. District leaders should certainly be able to do this.
For decades, the district's low-income schools, many of them predominantly black, actively discouraged their students from taking the AG courses that would qualify them for the state's four-year colleges and universities. Some schools did not even offer the necessary classes, and sometimes students at these schools were automatically enrolled in easier courses. Advanced Placement offers were rare when they existed. The teachers at these schools were less experienced. Math and science classes were often taught by rotating substitutes who had no subject experience.
This is not ancient history; the situation continued until the beginning of the 21st century.
Disparities have also affected Latino students, but LAUSD's history of disparaging black students has a much longer history. Many of the schools that received fewer resources or that steered students away from college were almost entirely black in 1980; They became predominantly Latino at the beginning of this century.
LAUSD appears to have ample reason to admit that it failed black students. Now is the time to fight for the children and teens you let down for so long.
