Minorities are falling behind — we need more money for schools. That’s the predictable thrust of the Associated Press story based on a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.
About three-quarters of Virginia’s public high school students graduate in four years, but there are large disparities between black and white students’ rates, according to a report released Tuesday by an education research group.
There were large gaps between white and black Virginians, with 77.8 percent of whites graduating, compared to 64.1 percent of black students. Black male students had the lowest graduation rate at 57.6 percent….
“The bigger story behind the numbers is that there are huge inequalities in terms of underfunding of local school systems across Virginia,” said Andy Block, legal director of advocacy group JustChildren.
When it comes to race relations, you can always count on the Mainstream Media to emphasize the negative, to reinforce the stereotype of African-Americans as victims, and to uncritically shill for any advocacy group crying for more money for schools.
Here are some perspectives that the research group and the AP writer chose not to take:
- Graduation rates in Virginia are higher for both whites (77.8 percent in Virginia vs. 76.2 percent nationally) and for blacks (64.1 percent in Virginia vs. 51.6 percent nationally). Elementary arithmetic reveals the astounding conclusion that the graduation rate for whites exceeds the national average by only 1.6 percentage points, while the graduation rate for blacks exceeds the national average by 12.5 percentage points — surely an indication that Virginia is doing something better than the rest of the nation when it comes to educating blacks!
- If the graduation rate for black males is 57.6 percent, and the average for all blacks is 64.1 percent, that implies that the graduation rate for black females is about 70 percent, very close to the state average for whites — a fact that the AP story neglects to mention.
- If there is a 12-13 percentage point discrepency in the graduation rate between black males and females, are we to assume that black males are uniquely disadvantaged? Or is there a factor within black culture — not necessarily school funding — that explains the difference?
- For that matter, is there a discrepency between white male and female graduation rates? There almost assuredly is. Does that mean white males are disadvantaged somehow? Is it possible that all males, whether white or black, are disadvantaged by the pedagogy of contemporary schools systems?
Finally, when we’re looking for solutions to drop-outs, I would suggest that the problem is not necessarily mo’ money. I would refer readers to a soon-to-be-published column in Bacon’s Rebellion, “Want Students to Go to School? How About Enforcing Truancy Laws?” by John Butcher. (This was scheduled for publication in the current edition of Bacon’s Rebellion but was omitted through an oversight. I’ll publish it in the next edition.)